We Cannot Achieve Shared Prosperity Under Water

Climate underwater

The following testimony was submitted to the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy on Tuesday, January 14, 2020.

Chairman Barrett, Chairman Golden, and Members of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy:

 I, Jonathan Cohn, Co-Chair of the Issues Committee of Progressive Massachusetts, am pleased to offer this testimony on behalf of Progressive Massachusetts. Progressive Massachusetts is a multi-issue, grassroots, member-based advocacy organization committed to an agenda of shared prosperity, racial and social justice, good governance and strong democracy, and sustainable infrastructure and environmental protection.

Progressive Massachusetts would like to go on the record IN SUPPORT of bills H.2810.

As a coastal state, Massachusetts is especially vulnerable to climate change. To put it bluntly, we cannot achieve shared prosperity under water.

More than a decade ago, the Global Warming Solutions Act was signed into law, committing the state to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25% below the 1990 baseline in 2020 and by at least 80% in 2050. However, as advocates have often pointed out, and the Supreme Judicial Court ruled recently, Massachusetts is not on track to meet its own goals.

After President Trump moved to pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement, elected officials from both parties in Massachusetts condemned this misguided move and said that Massachusetts would continue to push forward with climate mitigation. But we need more than just rhetoric. We need concrete policies that enable us to realize and build upon our current commitments.

H.2810 is such a policy. A 2014 study prepared for the Department of Natural Resources found putting a price on carbon in a scheme akin to that of this bill “would reduce state GHG emissions to a larger degree than most other Massachusetts programs that currently operate for this purpose.”[1] Indeed, it could reduce economy-wide emissions by 5-10%, with much of this reduction coming from the transportation sector.

The environmental benefits of such a pricing scheme are not limited to climate mitigation. The reduction in air pollution resulting from the price incentive could save over 300 lives over the next twenty years.[2]

We are pleased that H.2810 takes important steps to counteract any potential regressive economic effects of a carbon pricing scheme, making sure that low-income residents are not bearing the burden of climate mitigation. We also underscore the importance of the bill’s allocation of 20% of collected funds for a new Green Infrastructure Fund that would facilitate the decarbonization of the transportation sector and increase investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency, and climate resilience. Getting the price right is just the first step in the critical task of mitigating climate change.

The situation at the federal level for climate policy ambitious enough to meet the challenges before us is grim. It has thus become increasingly important for states like Massachusetts to redouble their commitments. We must do so to avoid regression, and we must do so to provide models for national policies as our state so often has.

Please Give a Favorable Report to H.2810.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Cohn

Chair, Issues Committee

Progressive Massachusetts

[1] www.mass.gov/eea/docs/doer/fuels/mass-carbon-tax-study.pdf

[2] https://climate-xchange.org/public-health-study/

We Need to Use Every Tool in the Toolbox

The following testimony was submitted to the Joint Committee on Housing on Tuesday, January 14, 2020.

Chairman Crighton, Chairman Honan, and Members of the Joint Committee on Housing:

My name is Jonathan Cohn, and I am the chair of the Issues Committee of Progressive Massachusetts, a statewide grassroots advocacy group committed to fighting for an equitable, just, democratic, and sustainable Commonwealth.

It is because of those values that we write today in support of H.3924 (An Act enabling local options for tenant protections) and S.773 (An Act supporting affordable housing with a local option for a fee to be applied to certain real estate transactions).

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 #41 in housing affordability (and #43 in cost of living).[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 (and 113 hours for a modest two-bedroom).[2] Monthly median rents have gone up by more than one-third since 2010, outpacing income growth.[3]

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.

But it also requires public investment. Over the last ten years, the need for affordable housing has increased, while funds for affordable housing have decreased at both federal and state levels.

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.

H.3924 provides the appropriate redress. It repeals the outdated and misguided statewide ban on rent stabilization policies and enables cities and towns to pass policies aimed to regulate rents, limit condo conversions, prevent landlords from evicting tenants without just cause (e.g., failure to pay rent, illegal activity), require landlords to inform tenants of their rights, and take other steps to protect tenants and ensure long-term affordability.

S.773 also removes barriers that cities and towns face in addressing the housing crisis. It would enable cities and towns to raise additional revenue for affordable housing by levying a small fee on real estate transactions (with the ability to establish exemptions as appropriate in each municipality).

There is no silver bullet to solving our affordable housing crisis. But if we are to have a chance at solving it, we must empower municipalities to take action. We thus encourage you to give a favorable report to H.3924 and S.773.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Cohn

Chair, Issues Committee

Progressive Massachusetts  

[1] https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/opportunity/affordability

[2] http://nlihc.org/oor/massachusetts

[3] https://www.zillow.com/ma/home-values/

The Enterprise: Rent Control on Beacon Hill

Ben Berke of The Enterprise wrote about the upcoming hearing on rent control on Beacon Hill — as well as the state of housing politics in MA:

Jonathan Cohn, who helps lead the advocacy group Progressive Massachusetts, said the bill will likely need broader support than it currently has to pass.

However, with House leadership considering plans to pass an omnibus housing bill this session, Cohn said legislators could force a vote on rent control and other tenant protections by adding them to the broader piece of legislation as amendments.

Voters: Tax the Rich and Big Corporations, Invest More in Transportation

Anybody who has ever waited in a station for perpetually delayed trains, driven through potholes, or sat in traffic congestion for hours on end knows that we have a transportation problem.

Indeed, a report earlier this year found that Boston had the worst rush-hour traffic of any major city. But this isn’t just a Boston issue: voters across the state think that transportation should be a higher priority for the Legislature.

According to a new survey from WBUR and MassINC, 77% of voters support raising new money to invest in the Massachusetts transportation system, with similar numbers across regions.

So what can we do about it?

The WBUR/MassINC poll tested various proposals.

WBUR Poll 2019 Transportation Revenue

The two most popular proposals for raising revenue were value capture and the Transportation Climate Initiative. In the former, the state would collect contributions from real estate development projects near highways or public transportation to help pay for that transportation infrastructure: in other words, the private developers are making a profit due to public investments, and the public deserves to share in that prosperity. Under the TCI, Massachusetts (and other participating states) would charge gasoline distributors a fee based on the amount of pollution their fuels produce.

What do these have in common? They’re taxing corporations. In a Gallup poll from two years ago, 67% of Americans said that corporations were paying too little in taxes.

Those at the bottom — a 15-cent gas tax increase, a hike in RMV fees, and adding tolls for driving to Logan — are directly felt by individuals. We can debate how regressive a gas tax is (the poor are much less likely to spend *any* money on gasoline), but what is clear is that it is not a politically sustainable foundation for revenue by itself.

The Fair Share Amendment, or “millionaire’s tax,” won’t be on the ballot until 2022, but we already know that this 4% surtax on income over $1 million is popular. The latest polling showed it had 69% support.

But we can’t wait until 2023. There are a variety of other ways that we can raise money from corporations and the rich right now.

Raise Up Massachusetts, for instance, is advocating for two in particular. First, we can tax GILTI (Global Intangible Low Taxed Income). Many multinational corporations who do business in MA use provisions of the federal tax code to shift their US profits to offshore tax havens. The federal tax code has provisions to tax some of that income; our state tax code should as well.

Second, many large corporations who do business in MA use various tax breaks and loopholes to pay only the existing corporate minimum tax of $456 per year. That’s right: only $465. We can–and should–create a tiered corporate minimum tax so that that larger corporations pay a minimum in proportion to the size of their business in MA.

Moreover, debates about corporate taxes often suffer from a lack of hard numbers–and that’s because of how evasive corporations are. Stronger rules around corporate disclosure would help identify bad actors in the business community and allow us to measure the effects of the loopholes in our existing corporate tax rules.

But why stop there?

If we’re talking about transportation, we can eliminate the absurd tax exemption for the sale and purchase of airplanes. It makes sense to exempt necessary goods from the sales tax, but last I checked, airplanes aren’t necessary personal goods.

We could also raise the capital gains tax. The highest-income 1 percent of households receive approximately 80 percent of capital gains income in Massachusetts, while the bottom 80 percent of households receive only 3 percent. And these high-income individuals clearly reap a benefit from our infrastructure investments: without them, how would they or their employees get to work or to meetings, and how would the goods and services on which their incomes depend get to market?

MassBudget has even more ideas, which they spelled out earlier this year here.

Overall, though, the message should be clear. We need to start investing more in our infrastructure, and in a wealthy state like ours, the rich and big corporations need to pay up.

MassLive: MA’s Struggling Higher Ed Sector

PM Issues Committee chair Jonathan Cohn was quoted in MassLive‘s Shira Schoenberg’s write-up of a bill passed by Beacon Hill to keep a closer eye on the financial conditions of the state’s colleges and universities in light of a spate of recent closures:

While the bill passed unanimously with no debate, the liberal advocacy group Progressive Massachusetts criticized lawmakers for not going far enough. Jonathan Cohn, chair of the issues committee for Progressive Massachusetts, said in a statement, “Making sure that students and the state are aware of a college’s imminent closure or tenuous financial status is great, but it doesn’t do anything to make higher education more affordable for Massachusetts families.”