Horowitz said the proposal will likely have the unintended consequence of making homes more expensive and putting homeownership out of reach for more buyers.
The Massachusetts economy is losing out on $2.3 billion in earnings and productivity every year because of the disconnect between employer need and foreign-educated worker skills, the Business Roundtable and the Tufts policy center determined.
“If you’re going to make the claim that our right-to-shelter law is increasing immigration into our state, you would have to say relative to other states nearby,” Horowitz said. “But lots of other states are seeing their shelter systems overwhelmed.”
“We’re in a housing crisis, and we have this great program that can create a lot of housing units,” said Evan Horowitz, the report’s author. “But we’re not taking full advantage.”
Adam Reilly talks with GBH News State House correspondent Katie Lannan and Evan Horowitz of Tufts University's Center for State Policy Analysis about the challenges of fiscal policymaking at a moment of intense uncertainty.
He said he’s surprised at just how much chatter he’s hearing about people wanting to leave. “A lot of it is gossip and it’s too early to have hard data,” he said. “But the gossip is super interesting and revealing in some way.”
“It’s the first month that all the weirdness of COVID was flushed out of the tax system,” Horowitz said. The revenue drop, he added, is a “reminder that the unusual times we’ve been living through were quite unusual.”
“There are some tax cuts that help wealthy people that are also good for competitiveness. And then there are some tax cuts that just help wealthy people, and these are closer to the latter,” said Horowitz.
“Sometimes tax cuts that benefit wealthy people also are important for competitiveness. Sometimes they’re not — they’re just tax cuts that benefit wealthy people,” he said.