What does it say about you when your favorite candy is Peanut M&Ms?
This question takes on high-calorie political significance in the wake of Gov. Maura Healey’s budget submission, which proposes to help balance the ledger with an assortment of tax hikes. Check that: according to Healey, these are tweaks in tax law that do not constitute raising taxes (“Hell no; no, no, no, no, no,” she explained). They just walk, talk and smell like they do.
Front and center among them: application of the 6.25% sales tax to candy by removing it from the list of “essential” foods that are exempt. “This isn’t about a new tax,” said the governor of the new tax. “Instead of having candy treated like a purchase of bread and eggs and milk…candy is now going to be treated in the same way as when you go to the bakery in the back of the grocery store and pick up cupcakes for your kids.”
Damn that stupid cupcake craze, now look what you’ve done! First, they came for my iced DD, extra skim with one Sweet ‘n’ Low; now they want to tax the hell out of my Kit Kats. In what parallel universe is a Reese’s not an essential food? When it comes to the state’s appetite for more revenue, even the Skybar might not be the limit.
Back to the question at hand, raised by Healey’s admission that Peanut M&Ms are her and Lt. Gov. Kim Driscoll’s favorite. According to Stephen Shapiro, an “innovation” consultant and author of “Personality Poker,” this is telling.
“Are you a chocolate covered peanut, showing the world your outermost social layers, only to hide your inner-most feelings?” he writes. “If so, you are probably a good people magnet. You might even be the life of the party. But you may also find deep relationships more difficult…. Are you a peanut M&M, hard on the outside and hard on the inside, with only a small layer where you let people in? This is not an ideal personality style for every day living, unless you truly prefer solitude – or should I say being alone.”
Yikes. If true, this doesn’t bode well for Healey’s re-election. After all, the candy non-tax tax is estimated to be worth only $25 million or so, chump change in the context of a $62 billion budget. And surely, the governor and her crack political team must have been well aware that her raid on the candy jar would be top of mind for Republicans designing their attacks for 2026. The ads write themselves: stage moms with cute babies, get ready for the auditions.
Don’t pull a Tolman and discount Healey’s political cleverness. She may be pulling a version of the old hunter’s trick of slipping a pack of burger meat into your kitbag; should an angry creature charge and you’re not sure you can stop it with your gun, throw down the meat to buy crucial escape time. HEALEY SCRAPS CANDY TAX might make a nice, timely headline at some point. Maybe paired with a gubernatorial commutation of the tax on whoopee pies (or even whoopee cushions): from done governor to fun governor with one pen stroke!
All kidding aside, the (not a) candy tax speaks to the tough scenario facing Healey. While she’s busy cashing in on the so-far bountiful harvest of the Millionaire’s Tax, economic climate change could dry up future crops. The state’s economy could easily be threatened by Trump-era policies on a range of fronts, including tariffs, cuts in academic research grants, and aggravated instability among our crucial European trading partners thanks to Putin butt-kissing.
Budget implosion and its tax-hike antidote has been political poison here for years, and Healey seems unlikely to be immune.
Thus, her challenge: if the gold-wrapped chocolate goose starts to melt, make sure it melts in your mouth, not in your hands.