By Jared Brey, Quarter 2, 2026
How much do the richest people owe to society? For a growing number of states, the answer is “more.”
Massachusetts voters approved a new tax called the Fair Share Amendment in 2022, for instance, levying 4 percent on incomes over a million dollars. Last fiscal year the tax brought in $3 billion in revenue — 50 percent more than voters had even been primed to expect. The revenue has helped make improvements to Boston’s ailing public transit system, expanded access to affordable child care, and made breakfast and lunch free for all K-12 students. Millionaires haven’t fled the state en masse as some opponents of the Fair Share Amendment suggested they might. And lawmakers in other places are looking at similar measures.
Washington, long a state with no income tax, this year adopted a 9.9 percent tax on incomes above $1 million. Maine recently enacted a budget with a 2 percent surcharge on high incomes. Rhode Island lawmakers are considering a similar proposal with a rate of 8.99 percent. Organizers in Michigan were collecting signatures for a ballot measure that would raise money for public schools with new taxes on incomes over $500,000. (They recently announced they were postponing the effort.)
The idea of taxing the rich to pay for public services is as old as time. But backers of the various proposals say it has additional momentum right now for a number of reasons. One is that income and wealth inequality are growing worse, with the richest 1 percent of U.S. households owning the largest share of wealth since modern record-keeping began. States are also coming down from a revenue high during the COVID-19 pandemic and looking for new sources of money. More acutely, state leaders say, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025, also known as H.R. 1, shifted more of the burden of certain social programs, like Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, onto states, while extending tax cuts for the wealthy passed during the first Trump administration. As Rhode Island’s budget director put it in a January presentation, “H.R. 1 really forced our hand on this.”
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While Massachusetts voters ultimately approved the Fair Share Amendment, the vote was closer than many expected it would be based on historic opinion polling around the idea. That’s because the timing was tough, says Phineas Baxandall, research director of the left-leaning Massachusetts Budget and Policy Center. State revenues were at rare heights, and the state was sending out millions in tax rebates. Ultimately it helped that the tax was tied to investments in transportation and education, areas that routinely trouble state budget negotiations and where voters often want more support.
“I think it can be reassuring to the public to know where the money’s going,” Baxandall says. “Partly because there’s so much antitax rhetoric that people might feel that the money would otherwise go into some mythical Department of Waste, Fraud and Abuse.”
