Penny For My Thoughts

For those of you outside of the New England area, you might not have heard about Massachusetts increasing its sales tax from 5% to 6.25%.  As I work in the human services industry, I see the sales tax increase as being a necessary evil-the programs that would have been cut would have been an utter disaster.  Massachusetts’ sales tax has been at 5% as long as I can remember-and its MUCH cheaper than the sales tax in, say, New York or Chicago.  Of course, as my mother pointed out, this is worth it IF the money actually goes to such programs (I think Newsies put it best with “How about a crooked politician/hey stupid that ain’t news no more.”)  Of course, then I got to thinking-I’m not crazy about sales taxes due to their regressive nature (wow, I did learn something in that Econ for Dummies course I took in college).  So the irony of this increase is that it disproportionally affects some of the same classes of people who are helped by it.