Oh, look, the sales tax in Massachusetts is about to jump 25 percent. On August 1, the sales tax will rise from 5 percent, where it's been for the last 34 years, to 6.25 percent.
Funny thing: although I'm a journalist who pays a fair amount of attention to state politics, although I've written several columns in the last year alone about the failure of Gov. Deval Patrick to live up to his campaign promise to craft a better, fairer tax policy for the Commonwealth, I apparently missed the raging public debate over the sales tax hike.
I remember Patrick pushing a $600 million gas tax increase. I remember a number of lawmakers saying Patrick's proposed gas tax was, in political parlance, dead on arrival. Next thing I know, in late June, the governor signs a 25-percent hike in the sales tax, worth an estimated $750 million in the next fiscal year, as part of the state's $27.5 billion budget for 2010.
Only in recent days have I begun to hear much that might pass for grumbling about what is the largest broad-based tax increase in Massachusetts in more than two decades. A number of stories in the Boston media and a few in our local papers note that "tax-free" New Hampshire is poised to benefit from its southern neighbor's tax hike. On New Hampshire Public Radio the other day, I heard John Hurst, head of the Retailers' Association of Massachusetts, say that state retailers were already losing billions to New Hampshire or to the Internet—"literally billions, with a b," Hurst emphasized—before the tax increase. The tax hike, he said, "is only going to make the situation worse."
As one who opposes increases in sales taxes and gas taxes and highway tolls because they are regressive—that is, they are flat taxes imposed without regard to the ability of people to pay them, claiming a far greater percentage of a poor person's earnings than a rich person's—I can get my eyes bulging and veins popping at the sickening hypocrisy of the left wing in Massachusetts. Progressives should be outraged by Patrick's failure to use a progressive form of taxation—the income tax—instead of relying on regressive taxes, including the higher sales tax, yet I haven't heard a peep.
Except for guys like John Hurst, you don't hear much complaining. There may be some political fallout, to be sure: Patrick's polling numbers are dismal, with an approval rating in the mid-30s, although he was sinking in the polls long before he signed the recent tax increase.
Meanwhile, Christy Mihos, a Republican gubernatorial candidate and well-known private businessman, has installed what he calls the "MassBackwards" camera—a surveillance camera—at the state border in Salem, N.H. to record the retail flight northward. Mihos seems sure that the sales tax issue has the potential to make voters mad enough to send Patrick packing.
I'm not convinced Mihos is right. Rather than being angry, the voters seem to me to be frustrated but largely resigned to a situation in which elected officials move largely unimpeded from one dubious initiative to the next. Patrick enjoys, in my view, a general acceptance that the budget problem this year required, as he put it, "tough choices among miserable options." Voters who erupted at the prospect of a gas tax six months ago were worn down by the time Patrick signed the sales tax hike in June. And rather than having the tax issue framed in such a way as to inspire public debate, voters watched from the sidelines as the "budget process" unfolded.
As I was musing over the muted public reaction to the tax hike last week, I heard local journalist Greg Saulmon talking on the radio about the ways in which the public and the media lose interest in important stories when the discussion moves from big ideas to detailed questions of process. In effect, Saulmon said, proponents of a particular development or initiative work to narrow the frame of the debate, to force critics to play what he and his Local Buzz co-author Bill Peters recently called "small-ball." A debate about process rather than policy, Saulmon said, leaves the public and the media increasingly frustrated and bored. In the end, the proponents get what they want largely by attrition, as the opposition gradually drops off.
I think that's what just happened with the sales tax. The Legislature and the governor didn't mess with a big-picture debate about taxes. Instead, what the media covered, and what the public saw, was a narrowly-framed story that tended to treat the resulting tax hike as the outcome—a reasonable outcome, to the anesthetized readers—of a fairly routine and very dull process."
