Hat tip to Shirley for this great news
According to the Boston Business Journal:
The Massachusetts Department of Revenue estimates that a drop in the state’s corporate tax rate will save corporations $148.5 million in the current fiscal year.
The corporate tax rate dropped to 8.25 percent as of Jan. 1, down from 8.75 percent. The DOR estimated that 35,000 Massachusetts-based businesses will benefit from the reduction. In a statement, Gov. Deval Patrick said the tax cut aims to free up money that could be used for job creation and business development at Bay State corporations.
It’s the second year in a row that the state’s corporate tax rate has gone down. The rate fell from 9.5 percent to 8.75 percent last year. It’s also scheduled to decline further next year, to 8 percent.
The DOR estimates the tax relief to corporations will reach a total of $411 million spread over fiscal years 2010, 2011 and 2012. The reductions are the result of corporate tax reform signed by Patrick in July 2008.
Happy new year, indeed! (and next year too!)
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Sometimes charming, sometimes aloof, always centrist and at core technocratic. That’s been my view of the Patrick administration. He’s socially liberal like most of Massachusetts, and he talks liberal with his rhetoric and his manner of expressing himself. But a liberal, surely he is not.
He’s New Democratic (Third Way, Clinton, Blair, blah blah), not social democratic. When the issue of corporations comes up its about providing the public services they like on their terms and while also giving extra goodies like tax credits, revised zoning, subsides, and other supports.
Its still help business to help people, rather than help people to help business.
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To your other point, yeah I can post stuff at Blue Mass Group, though I do not think my arguments will actually shift any Blue Mass regular’s political orientation.
I see the sympathy for electoral reform, progressive taxes, single payer, clean energy, and other green, rainbow, and lefty policy ideas. But I also see a a very dismissive attitude toward Greens, the GRP, and the whole concept of “outside the Democratic Party”. I think these kinds of sentiments change primarily through action and concrete engagement, like face-to-face conversation, coalition work, and shared activity. I certainly do this in my work in the student and labor movements.
Yeah maybe I (or we) should post there in a critical-constructive mode, commending things worth commending and offering a non-polemical view of how the Democratic Party and its officials operate in Massachusetts (and consistently press them to actually hold Democrats accountable from within, even if we think this is absurd).