With the support of wealthy investors and CEOs, the Massachusetts High Technology Council (MHTC) is attempting to qualify two questions for the November 2026 ballot. Together these questions, if voted on affirmatively, will strip billions in funding from classrooms, hospitals, and research centers, while locking the state into a worsening cycle of painful cuts.
The first question would cut the state’s income tax by 20%, giving millionaires massive tax breaks and creating a $5 billion deficit in the state budget. The second would create an increasingly restrictive cap on state investment that would lock Massachusetts into a worsening cycle of shrinking budgets and painful cuts.
Even as they tout these as “tax cuts for working families,” they are mainly tax cuts for millionaires. According to an analysis of Mass Budget and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the bottom 80% of households (income below $187,500) would see a tax break of $534. The 20% of households with the lowest incomes would receive an average tax cut of only $44 a year. The average tax cut for the top 1% of incomes would be over $31,000 per year.
Together, these two initiatives would force towns and cities across Massachusetts to lay off thousands of hard-working teachers, police officers, and firefighters, leaving families to pay the price for corporate greed. They would strip billions of dollars from classrooms, hospitals, and research that Massachusetts communities depend on.
These dramatic reductions to state revenue would do twice the damage of Trump’s Big Ugly Bill (which is estimated to cost Massachusetts well over $3 billion a year) and four times the damage from the worst recession of our lifetimes, the Great Financial Crash of 2008-2009.
They would put our state’s future on the line.
And this is just the first step of their program:
First, they want every penny of the Fair Share Amendment, the “millionaire’s tax,” put back into their pockets through tax cuts that ONLY benefit the One Percent.
Second, they want to set themselves up as the Oligarchs of our Commonwealth, dictating economic policy every year backed up with the threat of more devastating ballot questions.
This is the Trump counter-revolution right in our own state! It is the Fifth Column of MAGA subverting our gains for working people from within. We cannot, we MUST NOT, let them win!
You can learn more about these ballot initiatives and the Mass High Tech Council at Massachusetts High Technology Council (MHTC), and this fact sheet.
The coalitions of Massachusetts groups who are sounding the alarm on these ballot questions include Protect Massachusetts Future and Raise Up Massachusetts and they are fighting to “Save Our State” (SOS). Many members of the Mass High Tech Council are major businesses who want to retain good relations with political, business, and community leaders AND protect their bottom lines. Protect Massachusetts Future and Raise Up Mass are calling them out on social media, in street protests, and in legal challenges in the Supreme Judicial Court and the Office of Campaign and Political Finance. We have already persuaded eleven of the 64 member institutions and businesses of the Mass High Tech Council to resign their membership!
To get involved in our fightback on these Tech Bros, please join our protests in cities across the state in front of their businesses. Just this week, a major bank left the High Tech Council in response to scheduled protests. Let’s demand that the remaining member institutions leave the consortium of Tech Bros who want to seize control of our democracy!
MAPA will share upcoming protests as they are scheduled!
by Harris Gruman