Income Tax, Clean Elections Ride On Outcome of Ballot Initiatives

In the Cambridge area, Question 2 has dominated political debates about this fall’s ballot measures. But Massachusetts voters will also decide two other initiatives on Nov. 5—one on the fate of the income tax and another on the future of the state’s Clean Elections law.

Question 1

Question 1, which calls for the repeal of the state’s personal income tax, is the centerpiece of Libertarian gubernatorial candidate Carla Howell’s campaign. She calls it the “Small Government Act.”

“We don’t need an income tax and we need much lower property taxes,” she said at the Oct. 9 gubernatorial debateå.

The question has come under widespread criticism and polls predict it will fail by more than a 2-to-1 margin.

Michael J. Widmer, president of the Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation, a business lobby, says the measure would destroy the workings of state government.

“This is far and away the most sweeping and potentially disruptive ballot initiative ever to come before Massachusetts voters,” he says.

Howell, who calls Question 1 a “bold first step towards small government,” says that repealing the state income tax will create 300,000 to 500,000 new jobs in Massachusetts by pumping money into local consumers’ pockets.

She also says the act would give back an average of $3,000 to each taxpayer.

And she insists the state will still have plenty of money to do business, even after removing $9 billion in revenue from the $23 billion budget.

But Question 1 has come under fire from Democratic gubernatorial candidate Shannon P. O’Brien, Republican W. Mitt Romney and Green Party candidate Jill E. Stein ’73, who say that the bill will mean cuts in vital social programs.

“You can’t just eviscerate state government and expect that you’re not going to hurt lots of people,” O’Brien said at the debate.

Howell doesn’t deny that state programs will have to go. She says reducing the size of the government—in part by cutting all state funding for public education—will actually improve the services. Programs such as education work better at the local level, she says.

But Romney joins O’Brien and most policy experts in saying this approach just won’t work.

“I don’t see how you have no income tax and still be able to afford our schools and our care for elderly,” he said at the debate.

While Howell points out that nine other states have no income tax, Widmer of the Taxpayers Foundation says this argument is misleading. Six of those states compensate with higher real-estate and sales taxes, and the other three (Nevada, Alaska and Wyoming) benefit from rich natural resources or gambling revenue.

Widmer also questions the individual benefit involved in Question 1, saying the measure would mostly benefit the wealthy.

“This is a reverse robinhood scheme,” he says. “It’s a fraud.”

Question 3

The referendum that mandated Clean Elections passed in 1998 by a more than 2-to-1 margin.

But in a recent poll by the Boston Herald, 66 percent of voters now oppose Question 3—a non-binding measure that would advise the legislature to continue public funding for political candidates.

Pam Wilmot, executive director of the government watchdog group Common Cause of Massachusetts, says the wording of the initiative is misleading—and is designed to kill the public funding measure.

Question 3 states: “Do you support taxpayer money being used to fund political campaigns for public office in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts?”

Wilmot says this wording was slanted by State House Speaker Thomas Finneran, who is one of Clean Election’s biggest opponents.

“It was put on the ballot by the state legislature as a backdoor attempt to kill the voter-approved Clean Elections law,” Wilmot says. “But it purposely...presents it in the most negative light possible.”

But Stephen Allen, campaign director of the Coalition Against Taxpayer Funded Political Campaigns, disagrees that the wording is misleading.

“Could it be worded any simpler?” he says. “I think it’s simple, it’s straightforward and it requires a straightforward answer back.”

Allen, who calls the law “welfare for politicians,” says funding Clean Elections takes money away from vital state services and calls Clean Elections advocates overly optimistic about the law’s potential to reform the campaign finance system.

But Wilmot says opponents of the law cast Clean Elections in an entirely negative light.

She says that Massachusetts ranks 49th out of the 50 states in competitive elections—three-quarters of incumbents run without a challenger.

Allen counters that 45 of the 48 states that are more competitive than Massachusetts operate without public-funding laws.

The one Democrat who ran as a Clean Elections candidate this year—Warren E. Tolman—was soundly defeated in the party primary. But Wilmot says Clean Elections is not about any one candidate but about holding politicians accountable by forcing them to debate the issues.

—Staff writer Christopher M. Loomis can be reached at cloomis@fas.harvard.edu