W e applaud Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller for labeling last week?s slots charade in the House “a total fraud on the public.”
“Quit lying and cheating and stealing the public,” he said. Amen. We could not have said it any better. We only wish he referred to the tax increases in the same way. We agree with Miller that there is no need for a referendum. And that the House?s initial decision last week to pass a bill allowing slots to go to a referendum without also passing a bill outlining how they would operate makes no sense.
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House members made the right decision over the weekend to pass a bill detailing how and where people could play slots if passed by Marylanders. But legislators could do even better by passing a bill allowing them and scrapping the referendum when they return for the regular session in January. Marylanders want slots. They have been showing it with their feet by spending millions in neighboring states each year.
When the state is supposedly in the middle of a budget “crisis,” a referendum makes even less sense because it would be almost a year before people could vote on them ? and even longer before the state could start collecting revenue from operators to plug the ever-expanding deficit. The first, second and third orders of business when the regular session convenes in January must be to reduce expense increases driving a projected 2009 deficit, undo tax wounds inflicted during this farce of a special session, and pass slots.
