Yesterday I mentioned Vermont and its habit of making New Hampshire more desirable but let’s not forget Massachusetts, a leader in advancing the New Hampshire Advantage. Effective January first, it is enforcing a new tax on millionaires that could benefit the Granite State.
Related: Vermont Helps New Hampshire Widen Its Advantage
“Question 1 is set to raise taxes starting this Sunday, and for many small business owners, retirees, home (sellers), and high-income earners, they will be shocked to see their taxes go up by 80 percent,” Paul Diego Craney, a spokesperson for Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, said in an emailed statement.
January 1 wasn’t just the first day of the year, it was also the start of the 2023 tax season, during which any dollar made over $1 million will be taxed an extra 4% above the state’s flat 5% income tax rate.
Advocates promoted it as an equalizer, and since this is Massachusetts, no one ever considered lowering everyone else’s taxes to create the advertised perception. Make them pay more by taking less from you. Put that question before the people, and I bet it passes too. It will never happen in a tax and spend haven like The Bay State. The problem is finding revenue to meet their uncontrollable addiction to spending.
You sell it as a wealth tax and then sweep up retirees hoping to sell their homes to prop up their retirement. Small business owners get pinched, which suppresses their ability to create jobs (to which we can include the added weight of the MA J1 hike in the mandatory minimum wage). The obscenely™ rich, like the Kennedys and Kerrys, will effortlessly loophole and tax code their way around this the way Trump has if you’ve seen his taxes.
They wrote the tax code like every other law. If you can afford enough lawyers or experts to help you navigate, it has little or no effect on those with true wealth. Those who will be affected can look north to New Hampshire.
Sure, we have that interest and dividends tax, which is also a weight on retirees, and we’re not “tax-free,” but we’re a lot more tax-friendly. The total tax burden is consistently lower nationwide than most states and all of the New England states, despite my Massachusetts relatives pretending that can’t be true. The net result is a gross incentive to move your assets into the Granite State.
As with the Vermonter who leaps the Connecticut river for greener pastures, you must leave your voting history behind if you come across the Merrimack. Our Democrats are like yours. At least a few of them were yours. But they didn’t come here to escape tax and regulatory tyranny. They came to infect us with it and milk the Granite State dry just like Dems have in Massachusetts and Vermont (and increasingly, Maine).
Places where equalizing a tax burden or creating an incentive will never mean lowering or eliminating taxes—quite the opposite.
Because they don’t care about equality, they only care about spending other people’s money, and there is never enough of that.
HT | Boston Herald