"States Turning to Last Resorts in Budget Crisis" reads the New York Times headline. But the reality, at least here in Massachusetts, is that the first resort of the state and localities is to cut what most people would consider the last resort. "Whenever a town wants to scare the voters into increasing their own property taxes, they begin to cut services, in the order in which taxpayers care: fire, police, high school football, garbage, libraries," Howie Carr writes in the Boston Herald. "Now it's the state's turn to play Chicken Little. They're going to close a dozen Registry of Motor Vehicles branches--places everyone has to visit at least occasionally. That'll teach a good lesson to those taxpaying bastards who actually have to work for a living!" In other words, strategic cuts in services perversely become propaganda for tax increases.

Ironic that the services cut include the only ones the government *should* provide (if any at all)/

Thus, the seventy percent of the Mass. lemmings that voted against the abolition of state income tax. The sky most ceretainly would have fallen. Much the way it did when we adopted proposition 2 1/2. Right?