Maryland is having another one of those family feuds about business taxes and regulation that outsiders find hard to follow.
"MBNA! Business climate!" "Delaware! Loopholes!" "Marriott!" "Blackmail!" "Fair share!" "Confiscation!"
A small state with a liberal legislature, big corporations and neighbors with lower taxes and less regulation is going to have this conversation every five years or so, and it's healthy. Unfortunately, the discussion has a tendency to bulldoze nuances and polarize interest groups no matter what measure is under consideration.
I've got news for the conservative Maryland Chamber of Commerce: There are such things as just business taxes and good regulation. And here's a bombshell for the liberal Progressive Maryland: It is entirely possible to advocate and pass laws hurting not just business but all of Maryland.
The trick is figuring which is which.
The "combined reporting" tax measure - which still may have a chance in Annapolis even though the Senate rejected it last night - is the wave of the future and ought to be approved.
Gov. Martin O'Malley's proposed top personal-income bracket of 6.5 percent is an anti-business tax in disguise and should be reduced. In any event, a little more subtlety would be a good thing.
Much of the South still mourns the Confederacy. Here in Maryland, always more mercantile than the rest of our Southern brethren, the great lost cause is the credit-card company that got away.
Every time the General Assembly threatens something that displeases companies, they dredge up the tale of MBNA, Maryland usury laws and the business that rebuilt downtown Wilmington, Del.
Maryland Bank NA was then a credit-card affiliate of Maryland National Bank that wanted to charge membership fees, which Maryland outlawed, and raise interest rates beyond what state law allowed.
Letting MBNA escape to Wilmington with what turned out to be thousands of jobs ranks high on the list of Maryland mistakes.
Prohibiting companies from recovering their costs is not a great way to foster a positive economy. That's what usury laws did by limiting card rates to 18 percent on the first $700 of a card balance and 12 percent on the remainder.
Remember, it was 1981 and 1982, when inflation was nuts. Banks were paying as much as 18 percent to attract deposits and charging blue-chip corporate customers 20 percent on loans. Nobody knew how high rates would go. Gandhi himself, were he running a credit-card company, would have moved to Delaware, which allowed higher rates.
