Local Aid Cuts Would Be Unnecessary if Mass. Instituted a Progressive Income Tax

It has been a while since I've harped on the need for progressive taxation in Massachusetts, but with cuts to local aid looming in the state budget there's no time like the present. We're starting to see what happens when cities and towns are forced to cut past the bone because of a lack of state and federal funds to shore them up in the down economy - layoffs of core personnel and the elimination of key services. Last week Senate Ways and Means Committee Chairman Sen. Steven Panagiotakos (D-Lowell) and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Charles Murphy (D-Burlington) told local leadership to expect local aid cuts of up to 4 percent in next year's budget. Mayors like Kim Driscoll (D) of Salem have responded by starting to let the public know what this will mean for their communities. In Salem's case, it will translate to being forced to layoff 4 cops and 4.5 firefighters if that city is level-funded. If there are further cuts, there will be more layoffs. In Boston's case, one disturbing development among several is the call to shut down some library branches currently under debate in the City Council. More ominously, impoverished former industrial cities like Lawrence have already become essentially insolvent. Meanwhile, the few tax hikes on the table are regressive - primarily increases to sales and meals taxes - and have already been raised about as much as they can be without sparking revolts.

Missing from the debate is any serious talk about a return to the kind of progressive income tax the federal government had decades ago, and lost at the beginning of this age of free market evangelism - and that Massachusetts has never really had. Progressive income tax taxes poor, working and middle class families at lower rates, and wealthy individuals, stock holders and corporations at higher rates. There will still be rich and poor and inbetween under such a system, but more pressure is on the winners of the capitalist horse race to give back to the society that made their wealth possible than is currently the case.

If a progressive income tax were instituted on just the state level here in the Commonwealth, tens of millions of extra funds would be generated annually - which would go a long way towards closing the budget gaps that are well on their way to becoming budget chasms. Whatever rhetoric tax nay-sayers may level to the contrary, such reforms would go a long way towards ensuring the state will be able to keep meeting its basic obligations to the public trust. Which means that we can keep buildings from burning down, keep kids in school, and keep cherished public institutions like the libraries from fading into the memory of a democratic society that is drifting farther and farther away from its core Enlightenment values with each passing year.

So the fight for a progressive income tax - which would require a change to the state constitution to even become possible - starts to resemble many other fights that need to happen if working families are going to continue to be able to have a decent life in the Bay State (and the United States). And all these fights boil down to a simple choice from my perspective ... a good and democratic society or the war of all against all. Or as fellow Greek and fellow libertarian socialist Cornelius Castoriadis put it not long after World War II: "socialism or barbarism."

True a minor social democratic reform like progresssive taxation is only a drop in the bucket compared to the many larger democratic changes that need to be made to the American political system - like Constitutional rights in the workplace for a start. And keeping the more questionable government agencies (Mass. Office of Business Development) flush with cash along with many good insitutions (Mass. Department of Public Health) is fraught with contradictions for the political left. But at a time when (so-called) Libertarians and other conservatives can call for ever more tax cuts in the face of the thirdworldization of the American economy, it will probably be necessary to backtrack to reinstate reforms orginally won nationally at the turn of the last century before we can easily talk about moving forward to more significant progressive reforms. And we'd ultimately have to win progressive taxation back on the national level to really start to get a handle on the American economy. But that's a larger battle to say the least.

In any case, it will be easier for activists around the state to fight for progressive tax reforms than to continue fighting a series of losing rear-guard actions to preserve this or that public service. For example, it's great to see newly-elected Boston City Councilor Felix Arroyo, Jr. slugging away to keep city libraries open, but I also want to see him and other local pols fighting at least as hard for a tax system that will take some financial burden off of poor and working families and place it where it belongs - on the rich. We'll have more money in our state and local governments in short order, and then progressive activists and allies can get down to the work of winning some larger reforms like single-payer health care and public jobs programs on at least the state level.

At that point, at least in the Bay State, we'd then be moving away from barbarism. Which would be an improvement on the current disturbing state of affairs.

Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston