John Kerry is the gift that keeps on giving, a cornucopia of
contradictions and hypocrisy. After flip-flopping his way to
defeat in the 2004 presidential race, he is still doing the
opposite of what he says everyone should do, and it is still
getting him into trouble.
Last week the Boston Herald reported
that in March Kerry registered his $7 million yacht not in
Boston, where he lives, but in Newport, R.I. Kerry’s office has
said the Rhode Island registration had nothing whatsoever to do
with the fact that Rhode Island has no sales or use tax on boats,
but Massachusetts has both.
The Herald’s public service here was
not to expose Kerry as a hypocrite. Kerry needs no help doing
that. In 2004, he said people earning more than $200,000 should
pay more in taxes, but here he is dodging taxes on a $7 million
yacht. He also said it was immoral to move American manufacturing
jobs overseas. But he had his custom-built yacht made in New
Zealand. The real public service in the Herald
story was to expose just how awful Massachusetts taxes
are.
The state has a 6.25 percent sales and “use” tax on most
everything, not just boats. If you live in Massachusetts and buy
a product in sales-tax-free New Hampshire, where I live,
Massachusetts expects you to pay a tax just for the privilege of
using it. And the state is aggressive about pursuing that
tax.
Last year, Massachusetts tried to order a regional tire
chain doing business in neighboring states, Town Fair Tire, to
charge the state’s sales tax on tires purchased by Massachusetts
residents at New Hampshire stores. In the 1990s, the state
successfully forced Circuit City to pay sales taxes on items
stored in Massachusetts but purchased in another state.
In the past, Bay State tax collectors aggressively went
after residents who registered their cars and bought liquor in
New Hampshire. In the 1970s, New Hampshire Gov. Meldrim Thomson
sent state troopers to arrest Massachusetts tax agents who were
parked (Thomson said “loitering”) in New Hampshire Liquor Store
parking lots to record the license plate numbers of Bay Staters
buying N.H. booze.
Massachusetts has lowered a lot of taxes since earning its
“Taxachusetts” label, but its taxes still send people over the
border for all sorts of activities. A lot involve avoiding the
sales and use tax. And those tax dodgers include many of the
Democratic public officials who support high taxes.
Last year, a Massachusetts resident saw Massachusetts state
Rep. Michael Rodrigues walk out of a New Hampshire liquor store
with a box of booze. The poor representative had driven there in
his personal car, which bears his official legislative license
plates. It turns out that Rodrigues had voted earlier that year
to raise the state’s sales tax to 6.25 percent. Months later, he
was in New Hampshire (along with thousands of fellow Bay Staters)
dodging the very sales tax he had voted to raise.
Earlier this month, former U.S. Rep. Marty Mehan, D-Mass.,
now president of the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, was
caught by the Lowell Sun coming out of a
New Hampshire liquor store with two bottles of wine — a savings
of nearly $5 in taxes.
It’s not that John Kerry is a hypocrite. It’s that the
entire political class in Massachusetts is a bunch of hypocrites.
They support high taxes, except when given any opportunity to
dodge them.
They don’t really believe everyone should have to pay 6.25
percent to the state on every purchase. They simply find it a
convenient way to raise revenue. If they believed that their high
taxes were moral and just, they would pay them, not dodge
them.
With the Obama administration, the story of tax-dodging
advocates of high taxes has become familiar to the nation. To
those of us who live near Massachusetts, it’s an old, old
story.
