Policy We Support – Draft Compact for True Commonwealth
At the Crossroads: A Compact for the True Commonwealth
By overwhelmingly voting for Barack Obama and Elizabeth Warren, the people of Massachusetts said it’s time to invest to create jobs and opportunity for the middle class and for people striving to enter the middle class. We declared the old scheme–cutting taxes on the wealthy and creating special tax breaks for insiders–a failure; we will no longer accept warmed over “trickle-down” policies. We affirmed, as President Obama and Elizabeth Warren said again and again, that the economy must grow from the middle outwards.
We already know how to do this: after the second World War, we built the strongest economy and proudest middle class in history by investing in healthy communities and education, developing infrastructure, and partnering public investment with private industry. This is the mandate in Washington, for President Obama in his second term and Elizabeth Warren in her first. And here in the Commonwealth, we must enact these policies and strengthen this vision at the local and state level.
Massachusetts has the economic engine, creative and intellectual capital, environment, historic models, energy and inspiration to reinvest in, re-create and grow a true Common Wealth. We can build more opportunity and more equity, better prospects and greater justice. We can return to our foundational ideals that shaped our state, and then defined our nation. We can use the power and strength of our economy as our tool to shape a better society.
We do this by investing in the middle-class and jobs:
- supporting businesses and entrepreneurs who remain rooted in our communities — – not offering advantages and incentives to corporations that extract our wealth and resources.
- recognizing and developing our state’s unique competitive advantages and growing the industries that will give us advantages for decades to come
- ensuring that our regulatory structure and permitting process foster small businesses and start-ups,
- valuing the critical role of Labor in decision-making about corporate governance, social priorities, working conditions and wages.
We do this by investing in people:
- deepening our commitment to affordable, first-rate, public education for all children, regardless of where they live.
- recommitting to making public higher education affordable
- valuing jobs that support families, their security and stability by paying a living wage
- ensuring workers have the skills they need for the good paying jobs we have
We do this by investing in infrastructure:
- modernizing our public transportation and ensuring the funding is adequate to keep fares affordable
- improving roadways, bridges and digital highways, the drivers of economic growth.
- maintaining our role as a global leader in research and technology and clean energy
- reorienting our thinking, spending today’s dollars on tomorrow—rather than spending tomorrow’s dollars today.
We do this by fairly and adequately funding our government
- making our tax code reflect today’s economic realities not yesterday’s,
- unapologetically raising the revenue we need to grow and prosper as a Commonwealth.
- raising this new revenue primarily from the highest earners and shielding working families and seniors from the additional burden
We can do this: We have done it before. With leadership, political courage and grassroots advocacy, we will do it now, again.
For over 200 years, we have led the nation, always by investing in the future and with a deep sense of obligation to democratic self-determination and the community good:
- We created the first public park in our new country, and we called it Boston Commons.
- Our Constitution and form of government became a sturdy model for the nation.
- We founded the first public schools, built the first public transportation system.
- We were first legalize marriage for all, the first to offer health care insurance for all.
This Compact is offered in the spirit of all these firsts. We mean to be both pragmatic and idealistic, detailing specific ways to realize a common vision for our Commonwealth. We call on our legislators and fellow citizens to insist on making the promise of 2012 a reality.
Hi Progressive Mass. Thank you for the generous Facebook link and for the offer to read your Compact. I think it is great. I might suggest adding something about the Commonwealth’s commitment to helping persons with disabilities who aren’t able to support themselves through paid work. Looking forward to working with you to make Beacon Hill a more progressive place – thanks again.
HP
On Raising Massachusetts Revenues.
We check the forecast before traveling – Will we need an umbrella? When one makes plans, it’s good to have an idea of the situation that plan will probably deal with. Mass. Governor Patrick’s 2013 budget and transportation plans are built on some assumptions of how the future will be. There are projections of how much we will drive our cars, how much we will work, earn and spend, etc. To plan, we make assumptions about fuel prices and use, about employment, wages and interest rates, and about weather. If these are stated, we can discuss how these projections were created, how they match what we know of today’s world and how it’s changing. A ten year transportation plan expecting yesteryear’s fuel prices would be like sunglasses for a rainstorm. “The Way Forward:” must have an expectation in mind of what the future will be like, but it’s unstated in these plans. What’s the forecast?
Usually we assume things will continue as they have been. But our future will not be like our past, because of what’s going on in the rest of the world, where increasing numbers of people are earning and spending increasing amounts of money, and using increasing amounts of resources, emitting increasing amounts of carbon into air, increasingly altering the climate we rely on for our agriculture and food supply.
Our future in Massachusetts, the one we’ll be traveling in, will either have rapidly weirding weather or rapidly rising fossil fuel prices, and probably both.
How would we respond to European-level transport fuel prices? Would we drive as much, or would we move closer to work, or work from home?
How will higher fuel prices affect the transport choices we make? Will we choose public transport instead of our cars, and to what extent?
These are difficult questions, but ignoring them won’t help us plan well. It would be tragic if we fixed roads with borrowed money, only to find that we can not afford to use them as planned, because we can not afford to drive private cars as much as we do now. What we spend on new roads could be spent on new buses, or on new business’s equipment.
Together, we, the people of Massachusetts, have made our home state a nice place. Hence most people moving or living here really want to buy land here. ‘Location, location, location’ they say, controls real estate value. That location is in relation to the rest of us, and in relation to the communities we’ve built together. It is that location that gives most market value to land, and it is that location which our communities made valuable in the first place. Returning a portion of the market value we have created through our communities to maintain our communities makes sense. A state tax on land purchases would return a portion of the value we created when we built these fine communities.
We tax retail sales at the state level, yet we haven’t taxed real estate sales statewide. It’s only fair that we tax purchases of the rich as well as purchases of the poor, if we are to tax purchases at all. The proposed 4.5 percent sales tax, applied to real estate sales, would generate about $1.5 billion, so state revenues would increase about 1/30th.
Outer space, where we can not breath, is closer to us on earth than Dorchester is to Medford. With only about 7.5 miles of air above us, and about 400 ppm of CO2 now in our air, there is no longer airspace above earth for all the carbon in the fuels we could burn. We need to encourage each other to burn less, so as to maintain the climate, the agricultural systems and thus the food we all rely on. Those before us, to eliminate labor, substituted energy resources, which was brilliant in a world empty of people and full of resources, but now we’re running out of resources and have plenty of labor. It now makes more sense to use more plentiful labor and less rare resources, which will yield less pollution and more jobs.
Nothing says ‘Slow down’ like taxes. A carbon tax will encourage all of us to develop the methods and the equipment all the world will need tomorrow, for our food system to continue to yield our meals. So a state carbon tax can prepare our state to supply the world tomorrow with exports of goods and services. Carbon taxes inspire this needed change in technology to proceed faster, preserving resources, jobs and the environment. In Massachusetts, we each release about 14 tons of carbon dioxide per person per year. If taxed at $30/ton, as in British Colombia now, state carbon tax revenues would be raised by about $2.6 billion/year, or about a twentieth of existing state revenues.
These two new taxes would add about $4.1 billion to state revenues, about as much as higher ed. state revenues. These revenues would be relatively easy to collect. There are but a few sources of carbon entering Massachusetts; coal, natural gas, motor fuel etc. And real estate transfers are clear through county deed records.
As Massachusetts transitions to a more carbon-efficient future, access to public transit will be increasingly valued. One of the leading ways public transit is valued is through increases in real estate value due to nearby public transit access. This value increase is not due to the actions of the individual owner, but to the community’s actions, is fair to tax, and taxing this neighborhood increase in value can pay for all or some of the cost of extending public transit into new neighborhoods.
To do this, laws forming special tax districts surrounding newly transit-served neighborhoods would pass, so land value increases occurring as new public transit arrives would be taxed.
Brian Cady