The State of the State is light-years away from what our governor thinks it is
Normally I’m pretty fair and even-handed, so since it took me about five minutes to read the Governor’s thoughts and ten minutes to watch the GOP response, I’ll link to the text and embed the video:
Besides, I didn’t vote for O’Malley anyway. There’s much more below the jump.
Four bits a gallon (or more) for a state gas tax?
Governor Martin O’Malley, he of the trial balloons, may have yet another one up his sleeve.
His latest (of many) tax proposals would extend the state’s 6% sales tax to purchases of gasoline, on top of the current 23.5 cents per gallon surcharge the state takes. If adopted, Maryland would join a handful of other states which use this nebulous practice of profiting off high gasoline prices.
The other states which do this are California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and New York. To see what impact this proposed tax would have on our wallets, we need to use three methods of comparison. First, here are the per-gallon gasoline taxes charged by each of these states and Maryland, ranked lowest to highest, not including sales taxes or various fees added by each state: (Source)
- Florida, 4 cents per gallon
- Georgia, 7.5 cents per gallon
- New York, 8.1 cents per gallon
- Indiana, 18 cents per gallon
- Illinois, 19 cents per gallon
- Michigan, 19 cents per gallon
- Maryland, 23.5 cents per gallon
- California, 35.7 cents per gallon
And now the sales tax rates which are (or would presumably be) applied to gasoline, also listed lowest to highest:
- California, 2.25%
- Georgia, 4%
- Maryland, 6%
- Michigan, 6%
- Illinois, 6.25%
- Indiana, 7%
- New York, 8%
- Florida, 12%
Finally, the combined bite between all taxes (federal, state, and local) impacting gasoline in the states which charge sales tax, which includes where Maryland would eventually rank. To do their calculations, API uses the average cost per gallon in each state according to AAA as of 1/1/12. For Maryland, I couldn’t find the price on the specific 1/1 date but according to the latest AAA figures, the average price one month ago from today was $3.26 and that should suffice for being roughly the price on January 1st. Again, this is lowest to highest.
- Georgia, 47.8 cents per gallon
- Florida, 53.4 cents per gallon
- Illinois, 57.3 cents per gallon
- Indiana, 57.3 cents per gallon
- Michigan, 57.8 cents per gallon
- Maryland,
61.558.9 cents per gallon* - California, 67 cents per gallon
- New York, 67.4 cents per gallon
If this is passed, Maryland would have the fifth-highest total gasoline tax in the country, trailing New York, California, Connecticut (also 67 cents per gallon) and Hawaii (65.5 cents per gallon.) Maryland drivers would be ceding a much higher bite out of their wallets than their neighbors in West Virginia (51.8 cents per gallon), Pennsylvania (50.7 cents per gallon), Washington D.C. (41.9 cents per gallon), Delaware (41.4 cents per gallon), and Virginia (38.2 cents per gallon.) Retailers in those states who are fortunate enough to be close to the Maryland line are probably licking their chops about now.
Of course, this doesn’t factor in the addition of some of MOM’s other trial balloons like a separate 15 cent per-gallon increase in the gasoline tax or increasing the sales tax to 7 percent. And as Todd Eberly points out at The FreeStater Blog, this could all be a feint to make a direct 15 cent additional surcharge more palatable.
As it is currently proposed, the gasoline sales tax would be phased in 2% at a time so drivers wouldn’t be hit all at once. But when they’re projecting $613 million in new annual revenue at a time when the state is over $1 billion in the hole, it will be a surprise if they don’t rush the process. It may get passed this way for now, but wait for the new, improved bill to accelerate the increase next session when money is still tight.
We’re also being told that a gas tax increase is about infrastructure jobs in fixing bridges and roads. But the Maryland Public Policy Institute does a magnificent job of not only blowing that argument out of the water but also pointing out the folly of public transportation while they’re at it. Simply put, it’s another component of the War on Rural Maryland as those of us who drive greater distances because we choose to live away from urban woes will be subsidizing those who ride the buses or light rail in more-developed areas. That group doesn’t quite comprise the 1% but they’re pretty darn close, and they don’t come close to paying their own way.
Putting private transport out of reach to the average family through higher prices also fits neatly into the goals of so-called “Smart Growth” and “sustainable development”, which strives to increase the usage of mass transit. Perhaps this is a line of thought more suited to the tinfoil hat crowd, but one can’t deny it’s much easier to control the population if their movements are controlled.
In any event, the first step in rebuilding Maryland’s crumbling transportation infrastructure needs to come from locking away the Transportation Trust Fund from greedy governors who can’t shake their spending addiction. And if we take back the half of transportation spending we waste on a tiny percentage of commuters and instead gave them a more appropriate share of a nickel per dollar, there are a lot of bridges, road widening projects, and traffic control measures which could be completed for the rest of us who get tired of sitting in traffic.
On the Eastern Shore, we already will bear a significant burden from the newly increased tolls on the Bay Bridge, so we should get a break when it comes to gasoline taxes. The state should quit using the knee-jerk reaction it always seems to have about raising taxes and instead consider spending the vast amounts already collected more wisely.
* I was also taxing the existing tax, not the actual price. Subtract out the 41.9 cents we currently pay in taxes and the sales tax is actually on $2.84 of the $3.26 per gallon.
The McDermott notes: week 2
If you missed it two weeks ago, my intention is to spend time on Sunday evening reviewing local Delegate Mike McDermott’s weekly field notes. I find them a fascinating look into the workings of the Maryland General Assembly.
I skipped last week, but this edition of the General Assembly session seems to be settling into a familiar routine: a few bill introductions and hearings, with Mike sitting in on the Judiciary Committee hearings. Tonight I’ll do a review of week 2 based on Mike’s observations and tomorrow afternoon I’ll catch up with week 3.
To begin week 2, Mike commented on the celebration of Martin Luther King Day and remarks from former football player and Delegate Jay Walker, but concluded by reminding readers that MLK was a Republican and the civil rights movement seems to have both forgotten this and the fact Republicans helped get civil rights legislation passed despite the efforts of southern Democrats.
On Tuesday of that week, Mike helped to pass the very first bill to make it through the whole legislative process this year. SB46, which changed Somerset County’s legislative districts, passed as an emergency bill with the only dissenting vote cast by Anne Arundel County Delegate Don Dwyer.
But there’s an interesting sidelight to this particular bill. SB46, sponsored by Democrat Senator Jim Mathias of Worcester County, was passed through the legislative process. The crossfiled bill in the House, HB50, was sponsored by Republican Delegate Charles Otto of Somerset County but didn’t proceed past first reading. So who do you think will get credit and who will be cast as not doing his job?
The remaining time that Tuesday was spent reviewing bills on elder abuse, increasing penalties for malicious destruction of property by graffiti, and the release of mental patients found not criminally responsible. Obviously this can make you an expert on a lot of mundane, picayune items. But the Judiciary Committee only hears its portion of the bills before the entire General Assembly so one has to assume Mike does a lot of talking with fellow Republicans on other committees to hear their take on other bills which will be voted on later this session.
On Wednesday Mike spent the day in a hearing on out-of-court settlements, which brings me to the point above. It’s not clear whether this is germane to a bill already in the hopper or one being considered.
Thursday brought the Israeli Ambassador to the United States before the General Assembly as well as hearings on bills mandating the members of the Baltimore County Orphans’ Court be members of the Maryland Bar, abolishing some of the immunity enjoyed by members of the General Assembly, and expanding the harassment statute to add in items like text messaging and social media.
I suspect the Baltimore County bill is a trial balloon by the Maryland Bar Association to eliminate the possible competition for Orphans Court judge around the state. It’s the only judicial position a lay person can hold, and reducing the pool of people who can run allows attorneys a crack at another cushy judgeship.
Week 2 ended on Friday with the meeting of the Eastern Shore Delegation. Mike describes the speakers they heard from: Department of the Environment Secretary Robert Summers, Susquehanna River Basin Commission Director Paul Swartz (no relation), and the nine school superintendents on the Shore. Obviously he had many more questions than they could answer, but Mike brought up salient points regarding all three.
I happen to agree with Mike that the Eastern Shore takes an inordinate share of the blame for the Bay’s problems. We only contribute a small amount of the nitrogen that finds its way into the Chesapeake, but our farmers have to jump through hoops regardless. Soon they’ll be joined by those who will see the “flush tax” doubled if Governor O’Malley and Annapolis liberals have their way. Meanwhile, we can’t do much about the pollution which comes to the bay via the Susquehanna River – Mike uses the analogy of having a swimming pool with a hose connection to the neighbor’s septic tank. Obviously that would mean Pennsylvania and New York have to help us out, but they don’t really have to deal with the problem.
And as for the third meeting with the superintendents, it seems to me that any time Memo Diriker is brought into the conversation taxpayers need to watch their wallets. Somehow he always seems to advocate the most expensive solution, and I’d love to see the calculations that Diriker uses to claim each dollar spent on public education creates $1.90 in return. If that’s true, building Bennett Middle School should make next year’s Wicomico County budget a snap.
I’m not holding my breath.
Also on Friday of week 2, Mike introduced bills dealing with the criminal justice system, HB112 and HB119. Both will have a hearing Tuesday afternoon. Compared with some of the other bills I’ve read, these are very simple changes in the law. I’m not sure what fate HB112 will have, since I’m betting the ACLU and other similar groups will press hard against the measure, but HB119 has a fighting chance for success: it allows law enforcement officers in the field greater latitude to use their judgement on whether a misdemeanor offense deserves a simple citation or more intrusive action and has a small but bipartisan roster of co-sponsors.
During week 2 Mike also penned his thoughts on Martin O’Malley’s budget, where he chastises the governor who “lifts his eyes to Pennsylvania Avenue.” I agree with Mike: the 2016 campaign is already underway for Martin O’Malley, and my guess is that state Democrats have already been given their marching orders to try and make that happen.
I’ll look at Week 3 tomorrow, and try to get back to a Sunday evening routine afterward.
Movin’ on out
As I’ve said from time to time on this forum and others, Maryland is the first place (besides, to a limited extent, my college alma mater) where I lived by choice. And the main reasons I moved here, as opposed to other prospective places where I could have worked like Jacksonville, Las Vegas, or Phoenix, were the somewhat rural setting and the idea that this area had plenty of room for growth. Needless to say, when compared to those urban areas, Salisbury was by far the smallest location I considered.
There are serious economic handicaps about living here which have always existed more or less, but at the time of my arrival they were held somewhat in check by the state government in place in the fall of 2004. Sure, Bob Ehrlich was no doctrinaire conservative but most of his ideas for revenue enhancement were limited to increasing user fees, and Maryland participated fully in the national economic boom which was taking place during the Ehrlich era here. Unemployment for the state was just 4.4% when Ehrlich took office and 3.6% when he left – the rate never exceeded 4.6% during his tenure. Obviously things are different now, and Maryland reflects the national situation in that respect. Oddly enough, though, the other three places I was considering were among the hardest hit by the recession, so while Salisbury never quite reached that exhilarating height this fact made the low point easier to handle.
Is this the way to win an election?
Last night I was tipped off (h/t Richard Cross of Cross Purposes) to a Washington Post item regarding bipartisan support for the gas tax increase. Yes, you read that right – bipartisan.
It seems our Chamber of Commerce types have the misguided notion that increasing the gasoline tax will allow the state to fully fund transportation projects, but I ask of them: what planet are you living on again? This is Martin O’Malley’s Maryland – we all know that the money is going to be spent on 1,001 items in the general fund and the rest will go to build more mass transit and bike paths we don’t need.
Meanwhile, the victims of the War on Rural Maryland will have to once again pay through the nose perpetually, because as proposed by one possible scheme advanced by a state commission the gas tax isn’t just going to go up a nickel each year in 2013, 2014, and 2015 – nope, it’s going to be indexed afterward to a construction cost index. So as union demands get more and more brazen and the cost of construction climbs at a dizzying rate, so will the gas tax. Nice system if you can con people into believing the roads will actually get fixed.
The McDermott notes: week 1
As last year’s General Assembly session wore on, I found that freshman Delegate Mike McDermott’s weekly field notes were a very perceptive and comprehensive look at what was going on in Annapolis. So this year I’m making the executive decision to feature his notes (and my commentary on same) on a weekly basis, generally Sunday evenings.
McDermott is the one Delegate I voted for, although in future elections I won’t have that opportunity to re-elect him as Delegate unless I move to Somerset or southern Worcester county – the Democrats’ redistricting gerrymandering changed what was a two-delegate district based primarily in Worcester County, with the eastern half of Wicomico County added to create the requisite population, into two separate single-member districts with the existing District 38B truncated to be a district mostly based in the eastern portions of Salisbury along with Delmar and Fruitland. A new District 38C made up of eastern Wicomico and northern Worcester counties was then created, splitting Worcester County in two for the first time in recent memory. Oddly enough, we already have one prospective candidate there, but either Delegate McDermott or current District 38A Delegate Charles Otto of Somerset County – both freshman Republicans – will have to move up (to the Maryland Senate) or move out.
Now that you have a little bit of background on the man, I’ll go through what he had to say.
Mike begins by describing Wednesday’s opening session and the remarks by Governor O’Malley and House Speaker Michael Busch. I probably find it even more insulting than he does when it’s said that the state is better when it has the views from the right and the left in government – perhaps I’d be less insulted if that wasn’t so hypocritical on its face. If they really wanted views from the right, all the legislative districts would have been single-member districts done in a strictly geographical fashion – no little peninsulas to place one favored Delegate in a “friendly” district or districts which could pass for inkblots to make sure mainly minority voters get a district for themselves. I prefer the best, most conservative candidate no matter what color he or she is.
As for Thursday’s remarks, I found them interesting as well. Obviously the General Assembly gets into some seriously mundane issues, but I am surprised no one is clamoring for the inmates to get free calls because to do otherwise would be ‘unfair.’
Regarding a meeting by the Eastern Shore delegation with Secretary of Planning Richard Hall, McDermott related his opinion that:
It was quite clear that we are at polar ends of the specter (sic) with the O’Malley administration when it comes to PlanMaryland, but the concerns expressed were bi-partisan in nature. Maryland has operated for decades with a State Department of Planning that has worked to provide guidance to local government. This plan will turn that “guidance” into direct oversight.
Not only that, PlanMaryland places the state in a position to usurp local authority by withholding necessary funding if development doesn’t meet their (somewhat arbitrary) standards of ‘sustainability.’ Obviously if a county or municipality wants to “go it alone” that may be feasible for now, but I’m sure eventually the state will tie other funding, like the stipends they send for educational funding, to compliance. While it’s claimed the state has had the authority to enact a PlanMaryland since 1974, there was no reason to go around the legislative branch to come up with a plan that’s a key offensive of the War on Rural Maryland.
I’ll be interested to see what becomes of McDermott’s compensation bill, but I suspect Governor O’Malley will tell that committee head to lock it away in a desk drawer someplace until about the middle of April.
I look forward to receiving this weekly update from Delegate McDermott, but what I don’t look forward to is the assault on our wallets and our liberty sure to come from this body as the months wear on and the items enacted during the “90 Days of Terror” become law.
We might have to get that referendum pen ready.
Bait and switch
That Governor of ours, he is a slick one.
After hearing from Martin O’Malley for several months before the General Assembly session that we should have a increase in the gasoline tax, the flush tax, or a host of other tax and fee increases, Governor O’Malley instead chimed in his support for the second sales tax increase of his tenure. Certainly we’re no stranger to sales tax increases as the tax on alcohol went up 50 percent last summer, from 6 cents per dollar to 9 cents. It’s almost like he floated the other ideas as trial balloons in order to make the “added flexibility” of a sales tax more palatable.
“I think we should remember that no one in our state lost their house, lost their job, or lost a business because of an additional penny on the sales tax,” O’Malley whined in speaking with reporters. Maybe he should come to Salisbury and ask local business owners about the effects of the sales tax when compared to tax-free Delaware. His assertion may be technically correct, but certainly we’ve seen many lost opportunities with the differential between what we can charge and what can be charged in Delaware.
The Maryland Model (part two)
In part one I related the Maryland Model in its current state to the 2012 campaign, particularly when considering the battle to repeal the in-state tuition for illegal aliens passed last year by the General Assembly. The bill was petitioned to referendum as opponents turned the trick for the first time in over twenty years in Maryland.
As you should recall, I distilled the idea behind the Colorado Model liberal Democrats used to take over that state into four simpler M words: money, message, media, and mobilization. In this part I assess the overall shape conservatives here in Maryland exist in regarding these four issues – and we definitely need to do some work!
The Maryland Model (part one)
Over the holidays I did a little bit of light reading, and while I was doing so it occurred to me that the General Assembly session is sneaking up on us rather quickly. In 2011 that session set the scene for what turned out to be one of our side’s rare successes in Maryland, the petition drive to bring the in-state tuition law for illegal aliens to referendum later this year. It appears that will be on the ballot since CASA de Maryland and other pro-illegal groups are dropping the challenge to the petition signatures and narrowing their focus to whether the referendum itself is legal while simultaneously fundraising to sustain the law at the ballot box.
That fundraising: $10 million. What that means: carpet-bombing the media with images of poor, purportedly law-abiding and successful immigrant families being denied a chance at the American Dream due to racist TEA Partiers who hate all those who look different than they do. Don’t believe me? Just watch.
And this nicely leads me into my main points of this post, which will be the first of a multipart series on what I’m calling the Maryland Model. You see, part of my reading over the holidays was this RedState article on what is called the Colorado Model, which led me to read the original post on this strategy from the Weekly Standard back in 2008. Read those articles (I’ll wait for you) then take a look at how the CASA de Maryland folks are fighting the will of the people here in the Free State.
While they have seven pieces to the puzzle in the RedState article, I’ve consolidated these to what I can call the 4 M’s: money, message, media, and mobilization.
Why add to the debt?
Obviously this post I cite is an oversimplification of the educational approach needed for many children, but I thought it was appropriate to point this out given the fact a small group of parents – backed by an all-powerful school board and sympathetic County Executive and newspaper – are putting big-time pressure on our County Council to approve the debt necessary to build a new middle school.
But Richard F. Miniter, a writer posting on the American Thinker website, makes the case that education can be as simple as applying a little discipline and effort, given the vast library now available to anyone who has an e-reader and cares enough about their child to make sure they learn. And there is a time savings, as Miniter writes:
It also sums down to a little block of time because without having to get ready for the school bus; the bus ride; dispersing to classroom; disciplinary issues in classrooms; having to raise your hand to go to the bathroom; noisy, chaotic hallways scenes every fifty minutes; noisy, chaotic lunch periods; announcements; fire drills; lectures about bullying, respecting alternative lifestyles, or strangers; then preparing for the bus ride home, followed by homework, one can do a better job with a child in two hours than a traditional school classroom setting can in eight.
Now extrapolate that to the building itself. If one can learn in the small space of time allotted to learning at home, it can also be assumed that learning can be achieved in a regular school building, regardless of the age.
PlanMaryland, like it or not
Why? Because the Governor says so. And you will like it.
I have found it interesting over the last few days that our “beloved” Governor seems to be operating from the shadows. First of all, his hand-picked redistricting committee dumps out the General Assembly redistricting plan on a Friday evening, when many have tuned out for the weekend, and now this move a week before Christmas. It seems to me that he could have gotten the same thing by making it part of his legislative package for the 2012 session and legitimized PlanMaryland more in the eyes of the public. Instead, Martin O’Malley rams it into law via executive order. Maybe he has learned a lesson or two from Barack Obama and certainly eyes the 2016 Democratic nomination.
And while the Executive Order claims that “PlanMaryland is not a substitute for local comprehensive plans and it will not supplant local planning and zoning authority,” let’s see what happens if a local jurisdiction doesn’t “identify proposed Planning Areas by reviewing their existing comprehensive plans and regulations to see where and how they align with Planning Area Guidelines.” Of course, those will be commanded from on high at the Maryland Department of Planning – the same people who gave us our redistricting.
The biggest problem I have with PlanMaryland is my belief that those who already have growth and development will be allowed to keep going, while areas like ours which need something to spur job creation and attract growth will be starved. There’s no question that the Radical Green idea of maintaining our rural heritage isn’t one of agriculture, but restoring our land back to a state of wilderness. Sadly, we have a Governor who’s pretty much in allegiance to Radical Green – hence the War on Rural Maryland.
Moreover, it’s a question of autonomy. Similar to the argument for supporting an elected school board over one appointed by the Governor, generally the closer government is to the people the more responsive and proper it becomes. Our interests may not be those of some Annapolis bureaucrat in his cubicle, but with PlanMaryland what that faceless and feckless automaton says will dictate our policies regardless of how we would prefer to proceed.
Now that the process is underway, a group called the Smart Growth Subcabinet will have the task of receiving reports over the next 180 days from various state agencies on how they will implement PlanMaryland, then another 60 days to come up with a summary report. Thus, by the end of next summer we will have some idea of PlanMaryland’s effects on our way of life.
Speaking for the other side, Delegate Justin Ready noted that ”(t)he O’Malley Administration has said that PlanMaryland is nothing new. However, they have also said that it is a ‘first step’. My view is if this is a ‘first step’ towards any change in how we deal with land use in our state – that first step should be vetted by the General Assembly,” Ready concluded. “This discussion will definitely continue in the 2012 Legislative Session.”
However, the problem with Ready’s approach is that it’s almost certainly doomed to fail. Even if legislation which curtails some or all of PlanMaryland manages to pass the General Assembly it’s likely to be vetoed by Governor O’Malley. Then the question would obviously be whether the General Assembly could muster the votes to override next year and I don’t think the majority party really wants to cross the governor. They can conveniently let him take the blame since he’s not up for re-election in 2014 – but they are. And given the short attention span of many Maryland voters who don’t notice their freedoms being eroded drop by drop, they just might get away with it.
The ‘clean energy scam’ in Maryland
The inspiration for this post was received yesterday when I perused a commentary by Townhall.com writers Amy Oliver Cooke and Michael Sandoval called “Disasters Keep Hitting Clean Energy Scam.” It picks out over two dozen news items which illustrate the folly of so-called clean energy, alternatives which have “so far failed to demonstrate the necessary economic and energy-efficient capacity to succeed in a true energy market,” the authors write.
Their work got me to thinking about events closer to home. While Maryland doesn’t have its own Solyndra on a federal level and our efforts against Radical Green have been more concentrated lately on the battle to thwart the adoption of PlanMaryland, we indeed have our issues and spend many tax dollars on alternative energy. Governor O’Malley is foursquare a believer in anthropogenic climate change and has connived the Maryland General Assembly into passing several measures ceding a significant market share to these alternatives without a clear market demand for them.
For example, we’ve passed and since tightened twice a solar energy portfolio utilities are mandated to meet or pay a penalty, entered the extortion of local utilities otherwise known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative – a nifty model of wealth redistribution – and mandated a 25% reduction in greenhouse gases (read: our standard of living), just to name a few. Aside from the original solar energy portfolio mandates, these bills were all introduced at O’Malley’s behest and rushed through without much thought about the impact on the state’s economy. On the other hand, even exploring for offshore oil is something O’Malley “can’t imagine anyone actually wanting to go forward with” and tapping into a proven source of energy such as the Marcellus Shale formation has to be studied to death before Marylanders can take advantage. Meanwhile, our state is a net importer of electricity because of its high density, small land mass, and unwillingness to build the generating plants to bring balance (a Calvert Cliffs would likely not be built today.)
I have little doubt that there may come a time when some of these alternatives could work well, but the problem is we can’t depend on the fickle nature of natural phenomena to promote a 24/7/365 economy. To do so would place us in the same category as Third World nations which are lucky to have electricity a few hours a day, if at all. A stretch of cloudy, rainy days isn’t going to make a solar panel very useful nor will those hot, still days of midsummer do much to turn a wind turbine. Even a more reliable natural source like hydroelectric production could be curtailed by a lengthy dry spell.
It’s quite telling to me that radical environmentalists reflexively believe that any alternative energy or restriction of fossil fuel usage is great, and those skeptics like me need some sort of reeducation. (After all, why else would Maryland mandate environmental education in the schools? Can’t let those who know the real score influence those “skulls full of mush” in a politically incorrect way.) I’ll concede that someday in the distant future we will indeed eventually run out of marketable fossil fuels, but I have faith that someone in the private sector will also figure out a way forward – sort of like how Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, or the Wright brothers did.
The problem I have is in the force of law telling us we must adapt or the government tilting the playing field in a specific direction toward these unproven technologies. If someone wants to place a bed of solar panels or put up a windmill to power their farm (as was done a century ago) I say go ahead and do so – just pay for it out of your own pocket. If there’s economic viability in doing so, then by all means take advantage. But that economic viability shouldn’t include a cut from the state funding siphoned from your neighbors while other legitimate functions of government go wanting.








