Voters who have settled on a Ward 6 candidate: Why are you supporting your chosen candidate?

[keithn.livejournal.com]

I'm just curious from people who are not the candidates or linked closely to any of them - how did you reach your decision? I have personally found that for the issues I care about, I can't see much of a reason to vote for one candidate as opposed to any of the others. So I'll probably end up voting based on some other reason I haven't decided on yet. They all seem like good people.

I'm wondering as to what is driving other voters. I'm probably not a typical municipal election voter (as a young and relatively recent renting resident of 4 years) but I'm willing to bet some more people like me are here on DSLJ.

Comments

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

a graduated income tax (specifically, an extra 4% on incomes over $1 million)

It'd be a good start. Oddly, the Massachusetts Fair Share Amendment web site (http://raiseupma.org/constitutional-amendment-campaign/) doesn't give any figures for the amount of money to be raised, though a Globe article (https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/07/22/liberal-groups-push-for-higher-state-tax-wealthy/tZnjQepqGWctyXZ6WGx8FM/story.html) says around $1 billion per year. The MBTA revenue from transportation (http://www.mbta.com/uploadedfiles/About_the_T/Panel/MBTACapitalandOperatingBudgets.pdf) for the operating budget is $600 million per year, so it looks like we could remove the fares from the T if we earmarked 60% of the increased income taxes for it. There would be a problem in that high-end incomes are extremely volatile across the business cycle -- most of the money comes from people cashing out of businesses, which is heavily concentrated in boom years. But if some sort of rainy-day fund was used, that could be handled.