Massachusetts passed a 4% millionaire's tax last year. Now every public school student is going to get free lunch. | Business Insider México | Noticias pensadas para ti
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About $1 billion gathered from the new Massachusetts income tax will be used to provide all public school students in the state with free school breakfast and lunch.Mara Auster/Digital First Media/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty ImagesMassachusetts passed a 4% tax on people who make more than $1 million per year.Revenue from the new income tax is being used to give kids in the state free lunch and breakfast at school.Massachusetts is the eighth state to start free lunches since a pandemic-era federal program expired.Students in Massachusetts will get free lunch and breakfast at school thanks to a new 4% tax put on people who earn more than $1 million.Massachusetts voters passed a constitutional amendment that went into effect at the beginning of 2023 to put an additional 4% state income tax on people who make more than $1 million per year.Appropriation of the proceeds from the tax is subject to the state legislature, but lawmakers are expected to use it for public education and infrastructure repairs, according to local Boston television station WCVB.State House News Service, an independently owned news wire, reported that $1 billion of the state's record $56.2 billion fiscal budget for 2024 came from the state's new 4% tax on millionaires. Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey signed the budget on Wednesday, making Massachusetts the eighth state to adopt a free school lunch plan since federal free school lunches which started during the COVID-19 pandemic ended.The outlet reported that a portion of the $1 billion gathered from the new income tax will be used to provide all public school students in Massachusetts with free breakfast and lunch. Some of the money will also be allocated to help undocumented immigrants who went to high school in Massachusetts qualify for lower in-state tuition rates, according to SHNS.According to WCVB, state lawmakers agreed to put $523 million of revenue from the new tax toward education and put $477 million aside for transportation.In February, President Joe Biden urged lawmakers to pass his billionaires' tax proposal, which would impose a minimum 20% tax on households with a net worth of more than $100 million.Jared Bernstein, a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said the proposal would target "big corporations and the wealthiest Americans," while protecting people who make less than $400,000 per year from increased taxes, according to CNBC.Biden also signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law in February, which includes a 15% minimum tax on corporations earning more than $1 billion.Read the original article on Business Insider

Students in Massachusetts will get free lunch and breakfast at school thanks to a new 4% tax put on people who earn more than $1 million.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
    143·
    1 year ago

    Definitely think it should be higher for such wildly high income.

    Higher, nothing. There should be a rate above which it’s taxed at 100%. No one needs to be as rich as Musk or Zuckerberg or Bezos.

    • yoyogamer@lemmy.world
      25·
      1 year ago

      And yet you guys wonder why millionaires move to Texas. You increase the taxes above a certain number and they’ll take all their wealth, consumption and their taxes to another state.

      Taxes should be sustainable. High taxes on rich people aren’t sustainable because they’ll leave taking whatever taxes they pay and whatever consumption they do which contributes to the economy.

    • BubblyMango@lemmy.wtf
      59·
      1 year ago

      And no millioneir will keep his money in a state where those are the tax rates. If you make it too high you literally get nothing.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
            132·
            1 year ago

            So either they will get a lot of money or things won’t be any different except millionaires won’t be there hoarding wealth?

            I’m not seeing a downside yet.

            • doyoulikemyparka@feddit.uk
              8·
              1 year ago

              I think they mean the millionaires will find other ways to hoard it to avoid tax levels they won’t stomach. Fair? No. Reality? Probably.

              • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
                131·
                1 year ago

                People make the same argument about not returning to the tax rates of the 1950s. I say let’s try it and find out.

                • pinkdrunkenelephants@sopuli.xyz
                  13·
                  1 year ago

                  It would take massive and severe state action to deprive the rich of that wealth, and that money would still not find its way into the hands of the poor because the state, and corrupt bureaucrats within it, would take it for themselves.

                  The poor themselves would have to band together, organize, steal back all the resources from the rich, and distribute it amongst themselves fairly. And that won’t work without a deeply organized plan everyone in the group already agrees to, and even then it might not because the sociopaths and evil people among the poor – which comprises of a lot of them, sorry-not-sorry but it’s true – will just hoard all of those resources, creating a new ruling class.

                  Stuff like a ruling class is just the human condition because humanity is inherently evil. The non-evil humans will have to accept that reality is like this, figure out who is trustworthy and who is not, band together the like-minded, isolate themselves and pray a sociopath or evil person never infiltrates their ranks, figure out how to suss them out, and kill them.

                  Until humanity itself evolves to be more docile, it’ll never change.