Tax And Spending

I am fed up with the over the top criticism the tea party congressmen have been getting from members of the Obama Administration, Democrats in the Senate and the House, liberal pundits, and even from the inside the beltway Republicans who don't appreciate the fact that if it were not for the tea party freshmen class in the House, the Democrats would have remained the majority party. Vice President Joe Biden most recently called the tea party members of Congress "terrorists. " Other liberals have labeled tea party advocates as stupid or dangerous.

It's as true in life as it is in business: Nothing ever stands still. Regardless of how things appear, they're always moving forward or backward, getting better or getting worse.And here's another truism: In order to keep important things (or governmental services) moving forward and getting better, we must be prepared to either spend more money or provide the services in a much smarter, more economical way.Finally, we arrive at the ultimate governmental truism for modern day Baltimore County: Our citizens are already contributing the maximum they can contribute for the services they need.

Two reports came out last week that seemed to present a puzzling paradox. On the one hand, the Tax Foundation issued its annual rankings of state business friendliness based on taxes, and it pegged Maryland as sixth worst. On the other hand, the Census Bureau released figures showing that, once again, Maryland is the richest state in the nation, with a median household income of $70,545, about $1,500 more than last year. What gives? Sure, there are plenty of reasons in Maryland's case why business friendliness and prosperity wouldn't necessarily go together.

ARLINGTON, VA -- Democrats think they have found their deliverer. He is the new governor of Virginia, Timothy Kaine. So confident are they that Mr. Kaine can lead them to the electoral promised land, they have tapped him to deliver their party's response to President Bush's State of the Union speech. Given the threats posed by foreign and domestic terrorists, Democrats risk exposing Mr. Kaine as an inexperienced lightweight who is not in the president's league of knowledge and experience.

Picking up the newspaper recently, I've noticed that the same topics seem to be dominating most of the local headlines: in-state tuition for illegal immigrants, higher tolls, gay marriage, state workers forced to pay union dues, crime at theInner Harbor. But the topic that affects all Marylanders the most - the state's shaky economy and resulting business and job losses - doesn't seem to be garnering the attention it deserves. About a month ago, The Sun's Jamie Smith Hopkins reported that Maryland ranked last in the nation in job creation - 50th out of 50 states, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

With the fiscal cliff surmounted, at least temporarily, a new Congress sworn in and Republicans licking their self-inflicted wounds, it is tempting to theorize that a new political reality has taken hold in the nation's capital - one where the American economy won't be taken hostage by the House GOP and Washington won't bounce around from one trumped-up crisis to another. The best evidence of this would be the lopsided and bipartisan votes in favor of the final tax package approved by both the House and Senate.

The General Assembly will not cut income taxes this year despite having a $1 billion surplus, key lawmakers said yesterday. They said the state should instead spend its riches on education and other priorities. Their assessment came after state officials announced that Maryland's fiscal picture -- while still rosy -- isn't getting any rosier. The release of revenue projections for the next few months dashed any remaining hopes to cut income taxes this year. "You can't spend and cut at the same time.

The Japanese don't have to like or admire us. They just have to buy the cars we build with the steering wheel on the wrong side whether they want to or not.The legislators have a compromise tax-and-spending plan in which only half the libraries close.Cheer up. The Venezuelan coup failed.The law of racial preference in scholarships is perfectly clear: It is either forbidden or mandatory, never discretionary.How 'bout playing the Loyola-Towson basketball games in the Arena from now on, so we can all see?

Louis L. Goldstein began his unprecedented 10th consecutive term as Maryland's comptroller yesterday, as 300 friends, family and state political leaders gathered in the House of Delegates chamber in Annapolis to watch him take the oath of office.The 81-year-old Democrat from Calvert County urged state lawmakers to resist what he called the "tax-cut fever" sweeping the nation this year. He warned that a state tax cut now, coupled with proposed federal tax and spending cuts, could jeopardize Maryland's credit rating, costing taxpayers millions of dollars in higher interest.

J. Shawn Alcarese blames Standard & Poor's downgrade, along with all of our economic mess, on "[t]he unchecked government borrowing and spending since 2009, when Mr. Obama became president and the Democrats took control of both houses of Congress" ("U.S. was warned of a possible credit downgrade," Aug. 10). This is more of the partisan nonsense that passes for political debate these days. In fact, the Republicans previously controlled both Congress and the White House, and, during the Bush administration, tax cuts, an enormously costly prescription drug benefit in Medicare, extremely expensive and unfunded wars, and rising entitlement costs turned a $290 billion budget surplus in 2000 into a $455 billion deficit by 2008, and nearly doubled the national debt from $5.6 trillion to over $10 trillion and from 56 percent to over 84 percent of GDP. Then a Democratic Congress approved President Bush's bailouts of the financial industry that pushed the deficit and debt to higher levels.