I talked to several people who were polled by OpinionWorks, the firm that conducted The Sun's poll, and it was surprising how this disparate group - among them, an Eastern Shore retiree, a Western Maryland business owner, a Baltimore inner-city office worker - said much the same thing about their opposition to the tax hikes.
Namely, it's not just the taxes, but the timing.
"It's a bad time," said Shirley White, a retiree in Chestertown. "People are losing their homes. It's getting more expensive to live. Every time I go to the grocery store, it's more expensive. [My house] just got reassessed, so my property taxes are going to be going up. My electric bill has tripled."
"It's not just the 6 percent," Phyllis Neal of Baltimore's Penn North neighborhood said of the new sales tax. "Everything's going up - gas, electric - but your paycheck doesn't."
"People are struggling now," said Rebecca Mizak, who has an advertising agency in Cumberland. "There's a downward spiral in sales of homes. The value of homes is going down. It's a lot to put on the back of the common man."
I wasn't called by The Sun's pollsters who took the political temperature of Marylanders last week and found it quite feverish on the subject of tax increases, but if I had been, I might have vented some of my own personal economic angst in similar fashion.
Maybe it was that letter from the mortgage company that arrived earlier this month, saying my monthly payments would be going up a couple hundred dollars to shore up an escrow fund being depleted by the property taxes flowing out of it. Or maybe it's the credit card bills from Christmas that followed shortly thereafter.
Or maybe it's everyone asking the question, "Are we or aren't we headed into a recession?" and increasingly answering, "We so totally are."
"I think there's going to be a recession. I think there's going to be a cutback in spending," said Neal, who even cut up her credit cards last month to make sure she kept her own buying in check.
She's certainly not alone - retailers from Tiffany to Target are reporting slowdowns. But if you can, with varying amounts of willpower, resist a diamond necklace from Tiffany or a T-shirt from Target, you can't exactly resist the tax bill from the government. Death and taxes, as they say.
So now, O'Malley is faced with repairing his tax-battered image. But it might not be easy, as other potentially damaging measures loom ahead as the legislature convenes once again.
"If I could change it today, I would," White said of her vote to elect O'Malley as governor. "I don't approve of what he's doing to [schools Superintendent] Nancy Grasmick."
jean.marbella@baltsun.com
