PM in the News: Do Millionaire Surtaxes Lead to Millionaire Exodus?

Richard Solomon, “Do Millionaire Surtaxes Lead to Millionaire Exodus?,” People’s Policy Project, November 17, 2025.

“On a political level, passing Fair Share was a Herculean effort that squeaked by at 52% yes-vote, even in deep-blue Massachusetts. This might present a challenge for those seeking to replicate the strategy elsewhere. I spoke with Jonathan Cohn, policy director at Progressive Mass, as well as Enid Eckstein who served on the steering committee for the organization Raise Up that led the fight for Fair Share. According to them, Raise Up created a winning coalition for the amendment, backed by service worker, building, and teacher unions, even the AFL-CIO. The campaign survived a Supreme Court objection by finding a runaround through constitutional convention. Raise Up came out early on TV ads, canvassed nearly a million doors, and had disciplined messaging on earmarking funds and the home-selling issue.”

The wealthy were caught off guard by the amendment’s passage. Cohn told me that right-wing interests, having realized that repealing the millionaire surtax is a losing battle, are now collecting signatures to reduce state income taxes as a whole. According to Eckstein, the task ahead is not just staving off relapse to a more regressive tax structure but extending progressive gains to a corporate fair share tax on excess profits concealed offshore. Finally, as the People’s Policy Project has argued, further inroads against inequality and poverty will require plans to socialize capital income and fund generous welfare states.

Protecting Massachusetts Communities: Rally & Hearing

Federal immigration agents have been terrorizing communities across Massachusetts in service of Donald Trump’s xenophobic, hateful agenda. Families are torn apart, workplaces stripped of employees, and documented immigrants have feared their status will be revoked. Massachusetts can and must take action to better protect our communities.

Three key pro-immigrant bills will have hearings next week:

  • Safe Communities Act (H.2580 / S.1681), which would end the voluntary involvement of our public safety officials in civil immigration matters
  • Dignity Not Deportations Act (H.1588 / S.1122), which would prohibit sheriffs from voluntarily renting beds to ICE and ban agreements to deputize state and local law enforcement to ICE
  • Immigrant Legal Defense Act (H.1954 / S.1127), which would ensure that immigrants navigating our complex immigration courts have legal representation and make permanent a recent budgetary appropriation

Join us at the State House next Tuesday for a rally and the hearings fo rthese bills.

Protect Massachusetts Communities | Pre-Hearing Rally

Tuesday, November 25, 2025 at 9:00 AM

Massachusetts State House | Room 428

The Dignity Not Deportations bill and the Immigrant Legal Defense Act will have hearings at 10 am in Room A2. Information here.

The Safe Communities Act will have a hearing at 11:30 am in Gardner Auditorium. Information here.

If you are unable to attend in person, you may log into the livestream of the hearing at the Massachusetts Legislature website.

Legislative Session Update

Today was the last day for the MA House and Senate to take recorded votes before going on recess until the new year.

So far, only 61 bills have become law:

  • 31 of them were home rule petitions about specific cities or towns
  • 15 were personnel matters about specific individuals
  • 8 were budgets or supplemental budgets
  • 2 were bond authorizations
  • 2 were disease awareness days

That leaves only three other bills: a temporary extension of hybrid meeting access (good; make it permanent), setting next year’s state primary as September 1 (terrible for turnout), and updating our shield laws protecting access to abortion care and gender-affirming care (good and necessary).

Clearly, there’s work to do.

New State House Accountability Tool Launched

Two weeks out from the Legislature’s new deadline for committees to report out bills, a new tool — Beacon Hill Compliance Tracker (https://beaconhilltracker.org/) — highlights the extent to which the MA Legislature has yet to follow its own new rules.

In June, the MA House of Representatives and MA Senate agreed to joint rules for the first time since 2019. Following years of activist organizing around greater transparency in the legislative process, Beacon Hill adopted key reforms like public committee votes, public bill summaries, and 10-day notice for hearings. The House also adopted a series of rolling deadlines for reporting out bills from committees, with action required by 60 and, at latest, 90 days following a hearing.

The Beacon Hill Compliance Tracker, an independent, citizen-built tool developed in collaboration with us here at Progressive Mass and with Act on Mass, measures how well the Massachusetts Legislature complies with its own new commitments to transparency.

Democracy in Action: House’s MAGA Energy Bill Delayed

Because of calls and emails from people like you, the House delayed their MAGA energy bill that would have rolled back our climate, clean energy, and energy efficiency commitments.

The House will be redrafting an energy bill to vote on in the new year, so pressure will still be needed to ensure that we move forward, not backward. Stay tuned.

Testimony: MA Needs Action on Our Housing Crisis

Wednesday, November 19, 2025

Chair Cyr, Chair Haggerty, and Members of the Joint Committee on Housing. 

I am submitting testimony on behalf of Progressive Massachusetts. PM is a statewide, multi-issue, grassroots membership organization focused on fighting for policy that would make our Commonwealth more equitable, just, sustainable, and democratic. 

We see it all the time in polls, we hear it on the doors, and we see it in the data: Massachusetts has a housing crisis. More and more residents are unable to afford to live in our commonwealth anymore, priced out from one community to another and then out entirely, or face severe housing instability. 

We need a comprehensive approach to the housing crisis, and strong protections for tenants must be a part of it. We urge you to give a favorable report to H.2328: An Act enabling cities and towns to stabilize rents and protect tenants, H.1544 / S.998: An Act to guarantee a tenant’s first right of refusal, and S.968: An Act promoting access to counsel and housing stability in Massachusetts.

Massachusetts has a lot to offer, but that does little if people can’t afford to live here. The US News & World Report’s annual state rankings put Massachusetts at #47 in housing affordability. [1] A worker earning minimum wage in Massachusetts would have to work 91 hours a week to afford a modest one-bedroom rental home at market rate. [2] 

Clearly, Massachusetts has an affordable housing crisis. This is unsustainable. It has led to expanding economic inequality, increased homelessness, and damage to our economy, as talented workers often leave the state for less expensive regions.

Solving this affordable housing crisis will require us to use every tool in the toolbox. That requires zoning reform that encourages the creation of walkable, sustainable, and inclusive communities. It requires public investment. And it requires strengthening tenant protections that ensure that communities can remain affordable, inclusive, and stable.

However, municipalities across Massachusetts are blocked from taking the necessary steps to address the housing crisis. The misguided statewide ban on rent stabilization policies and a stringent home rule system that prevents municipalities from passing their own laws to govern the basic aspects of civil affairs hamstring municipalities.

By enabling our cities and towns to pass rent control ordinances tailored to their local needs, we can stem the displacement that is hitting so many communities.

We cannot build our way out of the crisis alone because the people at the highest risk for displacement will already be pushed out before they can benefit from any medium to long-term reduction in rents.

There is a lot of fear-mongering around rent control, but I want to make a simple point. If you don’t think a landlord should be able to double or triple someone’s rent in a year after doing no work on the property, you believe in rent control, and the question is just a matter of percentages and exemptions.

On too many issues, Massachusetts is haunted by the ghosts of ill-advised ballot initiatives past. It’s 2023, and we need to act like it.

Empowering cities and towns to respond to our housing crisis also requires passing the Tenant Opportunity to Purchase Act (TOPA). The TOPA bill, which is similarly an enabling bill, recognizes that we need to preserve our affordable housing stock. Too often, when large landlords sell a building, a mass eviction or rent hike follows for the tenants. TOPA shows that there is another way: as has been a proven success in DC for decades, we could enable tenants to come together to purchase the building—and be granted the right of first refusal in doing so. It’s a common-sense policy for community stability and affordable housing at no cost to the state.

Finally, the Legislature has made a commitment to access to counsel in the most recent budget cycle. However, we need to make this permanent in statute. S.968 bill would provide legal representation for low-income tenants and low-income owner-occupants in eviction proceedings. The eviction moratorium that the Legislature passed earlier in the pandemic was a vital lifeline for so many, but eviction filings have now been climbing past what they were in 2019, pre-pandemic. Tenants enter such eviction proceedings at a major disadvantage: according to FY2024 Trial Court data, while 90% of landlords are represented, less than 5% of tenants are represented. Tenants facing eviction are disproportionately poor, female, and BIPOC, and evictions can have lasting negative impacts on physical and mental health.

Connecticut, Maryland, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Washington have already passed Right to Counsel policies, and Massachusetts should join them. 

Sincerely, 

Jonathan Cohn 

Policy Director 

Progressive Massachusetts