By John L. Micek, April 24, 2026
If you ask the folks behind this year’s ballot push to shave a percentage point off the state’s income tax, they’ll tell you it’s all about preserving the commonwealth’s competitive advantage.
The way Max Page sees it, those are the right goals. It’s just the wrong conversation. Page, the president of the hugely influential Massachusetts Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union, is all in on competition. Pitching Massachusetts as an educational and technological leader that boasts great schools and is a great place to raise a family is exactly the right argument to make. But he’s absolutely not a fan of the roughly $5 billion hole the tax cut, if approved, will punch in the state’s bottom line. And he definitely doesn’t relish the cuts in programs, including education, that top lawmakers have said will be necessary to offset the revenue loss.
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Meanwhile, research by the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University concluded that the tax bill for the average middle-class household would shrink by around $1,250 a year.
And while that’s a savings, it’s not make or break for younger families who might look to a host of other factors to leave the state, Phineas Baxandall, the policy director at the Massachusetts Budget & Policy Center, said.
“What makes … people leave is, they maybe want a family, they maybe need some kind of affordable child care and they find that’s just really hard to do here,” he said. “We have some of the highest rents outside of California anywhere in the U.S.”“We still have inequality in how good our school systems are,” he continued. “So if you want to move to one of the best school systems, often the housing prices are really high. I think, for a young family, it often makes sense for reasons that have nothing to do with taxes,” Baxandall said.
