Three weeks after Comptroller Peter Franchot confirmed what everybody knew about the economy and state taxes, Gov. Martin O’Malley asked for cuts.
Budget and Management Secretary Eloise Foster must find them because the reality of economic decline through 2010 finally is sinking into the collective political unconsciousness.
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Revenue started dropping before fiscal 2008 ended, and we now are hemorrhaging at about a billion-dollar rate through 2010, so O’Malley is only a year late with the compression bandage of fiscal responsibility.
A few voices rose in November when O’Malley convened an “emergency” session to bleed us more instead of taking prophylactic action. The treatment we needed then was steady taxes and a start in healing the deficit cancer through precise, gradual spending surgery.
He and Democratic leaders said the deficit is “structural,” as if it’s some kind of immutable natural phenomenon they stumbled upon. They created it, they can restructure it.
Instead, last week O’Malley said he will bring hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts before the Board of Public Works Oct. 15.
Foster and department heads are “working aggressively” on up to 5 percent in immediate cuts. Franchot estimates revenues more than $400 million below original assumptions for this fiscal year and more than $500 million next. He made those estimates before the financial crisis last week.
O’Malley and Franchot would be wise to take their worst-case estimates and double them. The best it’s going to get the next few years is worse.
Every revenue flow is going to clot. Foreclosures and bankruptcies will go up. If he raises taxes, revenue will drop even more. Foreclosures and bankruptcies will rise.
O’Malley characterized the cuts as “painful.” They would be less painful if he had started a year ago.
Now, he and the Democratic leadership must cut fast and deep; the worst way.
Be assured, citizens, they will cut the most vulnerable, most visible, most essential services in a spiteful jab at taxpayers who dare to think we should get to retain a little in earnings from our labor.
Count on classroom teachers, line law enforcement officers, universities, prison guards, social workers and all other state employees who actually deliver high benefit/cost ratios getting the ax first. Poor children, the elderly and beloved iconic institutions also will be prime targets for the knife.
Don’t look for our feckless leaders to cut sweet-deal contracts for campaign contributors, six-figure patronage jobs for cronies or any other self-serving lard hidden throughout the budget.
Treatment Maryland needs for spending double the inflation rate requires precise, objective, nonpartisan surgery. O’Malley has what it takes to do it, if only he has the will.
Find cuts, sound off
The state budget www.msa.md.gov/msa/mdmanual/34bud/html/00list.html
Eloise Foster, Department of Management & Budget
www.msa.md.gov/msa/mdmanual/11dbm/html/dbm.html
Contact Delegates & Senators
mdelect.net/electedofficials/
Contact Gov. O’Malley
(Or call Gov. O’Malley at 410-974-3901; 800-811-8336; fax 410-974-3275)
www.governor.maryland.gov/mail/
Maryland Budget & Tax Policy Institute
www.marylandpolicy.org/
Avoiding Structural Deficits in Maryland
www.freestatefoundation.org/publications/recentfsfpublications.html
