April 15, the perennial income tax filing day, is not tax day this year. Thanks to a holiday many of us never heard of—Emancipation Day, the day slaves were freed in the District of Columbia by edict of Abraham Lincoln in 1862—this year we don’t have to file until April 18, since Emancipation Day is being celebrated in D.C. on April 15, and tax days can’t fall on holidays.
Anyway, the three-day de facto extension will pass; tax day will come; and the National Priorities Project offers some information about what we’ll get for what we pay. Comparisons of budgets proposed for 2011 and 2012 show that, in spite of budget cutting mania inside the Beltway, several programs that do good things for people on Main Street are on the list to get more money in 2012 than in 2011.
Among them are Head Start, with an allocation of $114,057,000 for Massachusetts in 2011 and $124,749,000 in 2012; school breakfast and lunch programs, with an allocation of $185,646,000 for the Bay State in 2011, $195,310,000 in 2012; and Section 8 housing vouchers, scheduled to bring $825,052,000 to the state in 2011, $860,254,000 in 2012.
But Medicaid will get a cut big enough to hurt a lot. For Massachusetts, Medicaid is funded at $8,070,044,000 for 2011; that will drop to $6,838, 372,000 in 2012. In neighboring Vermont, the 2011 funding of $892,565,000 for Medicaid will fall 7.59 percent to $824,861,000 in 2012.
And in both states, funding for LIHEAP, the low-income home heating assistance program, is slated for a major hit: down 53.13 percent in Massachusetts, down 54.64 percent in still-chillier Vermont.
In the larger picture, the question of where tax revenue comes from elicits some sobering numbers. Of the country’s expected revenue for 2012, 33.7 percent comes from individual income taxes, only 7.2 from corporate taxes—a far cry from the 1960s, when 20 percent or more of the country’s revenue came from corporate taxes. (That was before the corporations decided they could get more bang for the buck by simply buying Congresspeople.)
And slightly more than 53 percent will have to be raised by borrowing—from government trusts like the Social Security trust fund and from foreign countries. That’s ominous, and so is the fact that the prosperous part of the economy—the corporate part—is paying less even as the country depends more for its revenue on increasingly impoverished middle-class taxpayers.
