Should Massachusetts voters have a direct say in how much income tax they pay and when the state owes them refunds for surplus state revenues beyond a certain amount?

Several Massachusetts business groups believe that indeed they do.

Those organizations have gotten behind two proposed ballot initiatives that would put more money into peoples’ pockets by slicing the state income tax and returning excess revenues to taxpayers more frequently.

One proposed initiative would cut the state income tax rate from 5% to 4% by 2029. Another would lower the threshold at which the state must issue refunds from robust tax collections.

Those proposals — and many others filed by the Aug. 6 deadline — still need the attorney general’s approval and thousands of signatures before appearing on the 2026 statewide ballot.

The state’s spending is growing much faster than people’s paychecks, and cutting income taxes to 4% would save Massachusetts taxpayers much-needed cash, said Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, a business-supported think tank that initiated the income-tax measure.

Tax collections from all sources totaled $43.708 billion in fiscal 2025, a 7.1% increase over fiscal 2024 and 5.1% more than the benchmark, the Department of Revenue recently announced.

The fiscal 2026 budget of $61 billion represents about a 5% hike over the previous year’s $58 billion. The state budget has grown nearly 50% in just the last seven years. The tax proposals “both aim at the same purpose, which is to get more money into people’s hands and to make sure that the government is not growing faster than the people’s capacity to support that growth,” Stergios said.

A little enforced law, 62F, enacted by a ballot measure in 1986, requires the state to distribute refunds when revenue collections exceed a predetermined cap. The state has exceeded that cap only twice since the law was enacted.

The proposal, championed by the Mass Opportunity Alliance, composed of the Massachusetts High Technology Council, Pioneer Institute and the Massachusetts Competitive Partnership, would adjust the cap to allow for more frequent refunds.

And a new MOA poll of 1,007 registered Massachusetts voters conducted by research firm Big Village found almost three-fourths of respondents support a revised revenue cap to trigger more taxpayer refunds, including 67% of those with annual household incomes under $50,000, while 75% of those polled support the income tax cut.

But critics say that the proposals would seriously undermine the state budget and negatively affect important services. Reducing state income tax by 1 percentage point would reduce revenues by 20%, or nearly $5 billion, said Phineas Baxandall, director of research and policy analysis at the Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center.

Evan Horowitz, executive director at Tufts University’s Center for State Policy Analysis, said the change would have “huge implications” for what kinds of programs the state could afford.

“It’s going to come from everywhere, but most of what we do through state government is education and health care,” he said.

He said tax rates are precisely the kind of “very fundamental democratic debate” that makes sense for the public to consider via ballot measure.

If both backers and detractors of these initiatives both agree they should be decided by direct democracy, then let’s put that theory to the test by ensuring they qualify for the 2026 statewide ballot.

Sentinel & Enterprise

Editorial cartoon by Joe Heller (Joe Heller)