NO, was my vote at today's Constitutional Convention on the "Fair Share Amendment" also known as the "Millionaire Tax". In my 2017 special election and 2018 general election, I was very specific in expressing my strong opposition to this idea and ballot question.
I am not a rocket scientist but I am educated and informed enough to know a deception and a bad proposal when I see one. This proposal is nothing more than a graduated income tax that had been voted down by the people five times, the last was in 1994 with 70% of the voters rejecting it, and it didn't even get on the ballot in 2018 because the Court also rejected it. Regardless of the language used to deceive people by calling it "fair share" or a "millionaire" tax only, it is a graduated income tax and it does not work. It penalizes people for working hard and being successful. It does not work on the federal level and it will be a disaster for the Commonwealth.
Now the same deception is being used again, BUT they accidentally exposed their true intentions this time around. Three Democrats filed an amendment ahead of today's vote to allow a fully graduated income tax, meaning there will be income tax brackets for everybody making it very likely everyone will see a tax increase. They then withdrew the amendment hours before the vote. I am glad that they filed this amendment because now we get to see their true intentions of this bill. This was made even plainer with the rejection of two common-sense amendments that I voted in favor of. The first would establish a trust fund specifically for this tax revenue to be placed in where it would only be used for education and transportation infrastructure and would have also clarified that the new tax revenue would be in addition to any fund appropriated by the legislature and not instead of those funds. The second amendment would have exempted small businesses (also known as "S Businesses") from this new tax. Both of these amendments were unfortunately rejected.
Once again, instead of increasing the tax base by creating jobs or collecting almost $3 billion in uncollected taxes, they prefer increasing taxes. This is a terrible proposal for the economy, for small businesses and for you. We currently have a strong economy with record revenues in excess of one billion dollars. We are also funding public education at the highest level ever. Revenues are not the problem, how we are investing them is. Many of these Democrats think that the solution to every problem is raising taxes and fees. I would say this is because they don’t understand how to fix the problems.
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