Free New England: Question One on the Massachusetts Ballot

When they look back, they might wonder what all the excitement was about in this presidential race and why no one was looking at the really important event that changed American history: Question One on the Massachusetts ballot, to be voted on Nov. 4, which kills the state income tax.

Political officials, business and union leaders and community organizers are so fixed on defeating Question One, The Associated Press reports, that few are talking about what they’ll do if voters eliminate 40 percent of Massachusetts revenues.

Gov. Deval Patrick, the Massachusetts prototype for Barack Obama, said, “I’m counting on the people of Massachusetts to see it for what it is and vote it down.”

For a state that looks back to Kennedy, looks back to FDR, looks back and back and back, this is truly evolutionary. It would be a completely original idea in these parts — if they had not gotten it from us up here in New Hampshire.

We hear again and again that state and federal deficits will burden our children on to the next three generations. The Wall Street bailout alone will cost each of my kids $10,000, by some accounts. This is the equivalent of ancient European laws that required children to pay off the debts of their dead ancestors. It offers young people just starting life and work a long period of indentured servitude before they get to begin their own lives. Before they begin to pay off the college debt, get married and buy a house and have the first child and a washing machine, they must first support the leisurely retirement of a few county clerks who had their salaries doubled in the last year of employment so as to retire at, say, $80,000 a year — a kind of mischief we hear of going on today in California.

But it is not going to happen, because generations in power today have no moral or constitutional right to restrict or inhibit the freedom and creativity of future generations for their own comfort by passing along debt.

In America, they simply won’t do it. And this is how it will begin.

Visit Mr. Quigley’s website at http://quigleyblog.blogspot.com.