Around New England

Whack Businesses for Transportation Improvements, Not Gas Tax and Tolls and Uber, Says Left-of-Center Massachusetts Group

October 31, 2019

Some of the same interest groups that successfully pushed for a $15-an-hour minimum wage and other concessions to organized labor in Massachusetts are now looking to increase taxes on businesses in the state to pay for transportation improvements.

Raise Up Massachusetts, which supports a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would allow taxing people with incomes of $1 million or more at a significantly higher rate than other people, is calling for a tiered tax structure for businesses, so that businesses that make more money would pay taxes at a higher rate than those that don’t. 

The group is also calling for new state taxes on multinational corporations that do business in Massachusetts but are able to avoid state taxes by shifting profits made in the United States to tax havens elsewhere.

The group also wants what it calls “adequate disclosure laws” that would help state officials determine how much corporations are making. 

Raise Up Massachusetts isn’t keen on tax hikes currently being contemplated by Democratic leaders on Beacon Hill, including an increase in the gasoline tax, which the group says would disproportionately hurt poor people.

Higher tolls on the state’s roads and whacking transit services like Uber and Lyft also don’t appeal to Raise Up Massachusetts, which in a letter dated Thursday, October 31 calls them “regressive taxes and fees that disproportionately affect low- and middle-income people.”

Comments

comments