DORCHESTER REPORTER: Two ’26 ballot questions could upend state revenue plans

This piece originally appeared in The Dorchester Reporter on October 16, 2025.

Massachusetts residents entering voting booths on Nov. 3 next year will see the names of candidates for state representative, state senate, and members of Congress, in particular, US Sen. Ed Markey and his challengers.

But those elected state and federal offices on the ballot will likely be joined by more than a dozen ballot questions as outside supermarkets across the Commonwealth this fall solicitors have been gathering signatures on behalf of as many as 47 ballot initiatives on topics ranging from promoting transparency in the Legislature, instituting a statewide rent control law, and rolling back the state’s legalization of marijuana.

But according to some political observers, two ballot questions dealing with state revenue could have the most far-reaching consequences for Massachusetts residents.

There is the initiative petition for a Law Relative to Reducing the State Personal Income Tax Rate from 5 percent to 4 percent that would cut nearly $5 billion from the state’s $60 billion annual budget and a related petition for a Law Relative to Limiting State Tax Collection Growth and Returning Surpluses to Taxpayers that could cut as much as $2 billion from the budget.

Together, the petitions would, if passed, represent a nearly 12 percent slice of statewide revenue, forcing cuts to every corner of state government, from public schools and universities, the MBTA, to public benefits.

Opponents of the measures said the cuts they would impose on state government would be far reaching.

“It’s going to impose severe economic restrictions on government’s ability to provide services,” said Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees. “If the state loses that revenue, teaching positions will be eliminated and class sizes will be larger.”

Proponents of the ballot measures are James Stergios, president of the conservative Pioneer Institute, which is backing the income tax cut and the Mass High Technology Council, which is promoting the measure limiting tax collection growth.

Neither Stergios nor MHTC President Christopher Anderson responded to requests for comment by The Reporter’s press deadline.

The income tax cut would reduce the state’s largest single stream of revenue by 20 percent. The revenue limiting measure would force the state to refund taxpayers any time the state’s total revenue collections increased by more than the average rate of wage increases in Massachusetts over a three-year period. Together, the measures would constitute the largest drop in state revenue in decades.

“You couldn’t have a worse time for this to happen in the middle of the Trump administration when we’re getting billions of dollars of cuts,” said Phineas Baxendall, director of research and policy analysis at the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center.

According to an online dashboard maintained by Gov. Healey’s administration, the Trump administration tax cuts have so far cut $3.7 billion — more than 5 percent — from the state budget.
Those subtractions affect everything from Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits that aid low-income people in purchasing food to the federal research grants that many universities and tech firms rely on to develop new medicines and technologies.

Previous attempts at tax reduction ballot questions haven’t always been successful. A 2008 question sponsored by libertarians Carla Howell and Michael Cloud that would have eliminated the state income tax was defeated soundly with 70 percent of voters opposing. In 2010, a ballot question that would have reduced the state sales tax from 6.25 to 3 percent, also backed by Howell, lost with 56.8 percent of voters opposing.

In both of those referenda, however, libertarian backers of the measures failed to raise enough funding to mount serious campaigns on their behalf while a coalition of unions spent heavily to defeat the measures. With respect to next year’s referenda – if they make it to the ballot – the corporate members of the Massachusetts High Technology Council could potentially raise and spend millions of dollars in backing the initiative efforts.

Other members of the high technology council, including Bridgewater State University, UMass Boston, UMass Lowell, and Bunker Hill Community College, could see their budgets slashed with 12 percent cuts that the measures mandate.

“The revenue loss would translate into cuts in everything, universities, teacher, fire departments,” said American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts President Jessica Tang. “I truly don’t understand how these are being considered now. This would not help our state’s economic competitiveness.”

For a question to appear on the ballot, backers of a petition must secure 75,574 signatures from registered voters. The backers of the income tax and revenue growth-limiting questions are using paid signature gatherers — a common practice.

A legislative push for revenue

Raise Up Massachusetts, a union-backed coalition of community-based organizations and statewide advocacy groups, is pushing for changes to the way the state taxes corporations with offshore profits. The group says Massachusetts is leaving hundreds of millions of dollars on the table by taxing those profits at a rate ten times lower than the ones that neighboring states use to tax them.

Raise Up members say that the change they’re pushing in the Legislature — called the Corporate Fair Share bill — would increase revenues collected by as much as $400 million. With those revenues and funds from the state’s $8 billion rainy day fund, they hope to avoid cuts health care that are expected due to loss of federal aid caused by the Trump administration’s so-called “Big Beautiful bill.”

Kurt Wise, a senior analyst for the Mass Budget and Policy Center, testified before the Legislature that the proposed changes for companies with offshore profits would make the tax system more fair for local businesses.

“Hundreds of thousands of small and mid-size businesses would benefit from this leveling of the playing field against large multinational corporations that currently enjoy what amounts to a sizable tax break – a tax break that is unavailable to the overwhelming majority of Massachusetts businesses,” he said.