Grace Ross on Budget & Economy

Shift $3B in more taxes on very rich by flattening tax rates

ROSS: Well, it's very straightforward. If you add together all the many taxes that everyone's been talking about and you look at who pays those taxes it turns out that the folks at the bottom pay about twice out of every dollar what the folks at the top do. So if we had a system that was even flat, not just for income tax but for all taxes, we would have about $3 billion more, mostly coming from the folks at the very top. So that's $3 billion more in a $22 billion budget. Then if we look at an issue like we spend about a billion dollars a year on sweetheart siting deals for big corporations--we have a very uneven system. That's a billion more dollars in our budget, combine reporting for corporations, which requires them to actually pay for the business they do in Massachusetts, we get almost $5 billion back with all of those.