State won?t budge on budget

I don’t mean Ralph Friedgen’s Terps. I mean the whole state. So pat yourself on the back and fork over your cash.

It’s not a stickup, but it might as well be. Maryland’s $1.1 billion deficit (according to a new tally) earned us a spot as Business Week’s 10th worst state budget. Not exactly the distinction you were hoping for, though it’s unsurprising.

To hear politicians claim, we have a “structural deficit.” What that means is they consistently spend more than they bring in from taxes. In a place other than the Formerly Free State, such a problem might have been met with true spending cuts. Maryland’s politicians are “structurally” unable to live within our means.

It could be worse. Take California, for example. The Guvenator and the legislature oversaw a budget that got $15 billion out of whack. With California’s population more than six times bigger than Maryland, a budget problem 13 times bigger is hard to swallow.

But California was hit harder by the housing slowdown, so give us time and we might catch up. Largely because our legislators don’t know how to stop spending, they just raise taxes, like our dear governor.

Here in O’Malley’s America, we got the largest tax increase in state history, and a year later, we’re out of cash. Someone in Annapolis needs to take remedial math — just not in the Baltimore City schools. (We aren’t that desperate yet.)

Maybe we don’t need a math lesson, so how about we open our history text instead? Last year when O’Malley called the famous special session to address the budget, he said he was working for the future. “This is a forward-looking plan,” O’Malley said to the Associated Press on Oct. 15 of last year. Apparently, it wasn’t forward enough because, as Ronald Reagan said, “There you go again.”

And there we go again right with him.

Only a few days later he said it was so simple even a “C student” like him could get it. He told the AP: “To those who say, ‘Well, this is complicated, it has a lot of moving parts,’ it might be a little more complicated than some of the cliches and bromides you hear typically in American politics, but a ‘C’ student can get this, and we’re going to get it too.” We certainly did.

Even worse, House Democratic leader Del. Kumar Barve, Montgomery, had the audacity to claim, “We are fixing the fiscal problem in Maryland.”

Not exactly, Del. Barve. Not even close. O’Malley just proposed new cuts of $250 million and wants to hack $200 million from projected surplus. That’s all because revenue projections have dropped and they’re even lower for 2010.

If this seems like a rerun, that’s because it is. Maryland is in budget trouble. The General Assembly lacked the willpower (or courage) to approve slots, so we are more than a few days late and hundreds of millions of dollars short.

With that attitude, we could be chanting “We’re No. 1” any day.

Dan Gainor can be seen on the new Fox Business Network. He is T. Boone Pickens fellow at the Media Research Center’s Business & Media Institute, a career journalist and media commentator. He can be reached at [email protected].