Tax Exemption

Take tax exemption, summer workers urgedAttention, summer workers!If you expect to earn less than $6,400 a year, you can avoid having state taxes withheld from your paycheck. The interest-free loan to the state isn't worth the hassle of processing paperwork and issuing refund checks.That's the message Maryland Comptroller Louis L. Goldstein wants to send to students planning to hold jobs this summer.Every year, his office mails out about 176,000 tax refunds to summer workers who could have had slightly bigger paychecks.

A Maryland Senate committee looking for ways to balance the state's 1992 budget opted for new taxes on tobacco and food, deeper cuts in spending and a pay cut for top wage earners in the Schaefer administration.The unorthodox package of money-saving and -raising proposals which includes borrowing up to $20 million from the state's automobile insurance fund to help Baltimore -- was approved by the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee yesterday and is expected to come before the full Senate next week.

After 30 years serving with the Navy in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, Edward T. Kreiner Sr. is spending his retirement years fighting for Maryland veterans. The 80-year-old Bel Air man will testify in Annapolis today as the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee considers a proposal to double the state income tax exemption on military retirement pay to $10,000. For nearly a decade, Kreiner and other veterans have pushed to exempt all military pension earnings from the state income tax - a step that he says would benefit nearly 50,000 Maryland residents.

Sen. Benjamin Cardin's recent letter defending Bono and his ONE foundation puts him in direct opposition to President Obama's appeal for "corporate jet" owners to pay their fair share of tax ("Cardin: ONE Campaign works," June 27). U2 are major tax evaders. I am also perturbed by Senator Cardin's statement that Bono and the ONE campaign exercised significant influence on framing legislation in the financial services bill. Paul Hewson, aka Bono, exemplifies the worst characteristics of Wall Street, both for excess and tax evasion.

Four months after D-Day, in the Allied campaign to run the Nazis out of southern France, Cpl. Joseph M. Paesch had nearly half his face blown off by shrapnel in a bloody battle for a key piece of ground.He was left for dead when the Germans overran the Allied position. He probably would have died if American GIs hadn't retaken the area three days later and discovered a heartbeat in what they at first mistook for a corpse.Mr. Paesch is exactly the type of former soldier the Maryland legislature had in mind in 1950 when it granted a property tax exemption to all World War II veterans who were 100 percent disabled as a result of a service-connected injury.

If you're tempted to think of the late 1940s and 1950s as a Golden Age of family life, here are some statistics worth pondering: In 1948, as the baby boom was starting up, the tax exemption for one dependent amounted to 42 percent of the nation's per capita personal income. A family of four -- a father, mother and two children -- would have little or no tax liability.By 1984, the exemption for one dependent was worth only 7.6 percent of the nation's per capita personal income. The situation was marginally better by 1990, when a major tax reform law and a significant increase in the personal exemption had increased the value of the dependent exemption to 11.1 percent.

Is Maryland hostile to high-technology companies? Judge for yourself:* Manufacturers receive local exemptions from the state's personal property tax, but high-tech firms do not.* High-tech firms must pay sales tax on sterile lab garments and test tubes, even though most other states give tax breaks for these research and development tools.* Quality-control testing of a product isn't tax-exempt for most high-tech firms, but it is tax-exempt for many manufacturing processes.Maryland's tax code is an artifact of our industrial past.

Too many incentives to have childrenNicholas Demerath's column ("If the planet's to survive, we must control population," Other Voices, Nov. 20), which addresses the critical need to control population growth, was excellent. Responsible media such as The Evening Sun mus take the lead on this issue because individuals have a natural desire to have children and to ignore the consequences.One of the ways that we encourage population growth in the U.S. aside from religious preaching and insufficient availability of birth control is through the unlimited financial subsidy of families.

After 30 years serving with the Navy in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, Edward T. Kreiner Sr. is spending his retirement years fighting for Maryland veterans. The 80-year-old Bel Air man will testify in Annapolis today as the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee considers a proposal to double the state income tax exemption on military retirement pay to $10,000. For nearly a decade, Kreiner and other veterans have pushed to exempt all military pension earnings from the state income tax - a step that he says would benefit nearly 50,000 Maryland residents.

The Baltimore City Council gave unanimous, fast-track approval last night to a compromise early retirement plan that could eliminate several hundred city jobs by the end of the year.But some key council members and Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke continue to differ on whether the plan would also erase the need to raise any taxes.Council members said that the plan giving about 1,500 eligible employees incentives to retire by Dec. 31 should generate enough savings to close a $4.9 million gap in the budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1. Police, firefighters and teachers are not eligible.