The Maryland General Assembly makes mistakes all the time, just as newspapers do.
So many mistakes get made that each year the legislature passes the “annual corrective Bill,” which remedies technical errors made in the previous year?s legislation. The errors include typos, misnumbering of sections and references to the wrong part of the Maryland code. This year?s corrective bill is 54 pages.
Journalism and lawmaking are human processes. No amount of proofreading or editing catches all the flubs.
Figuring out you got a name wrong is easy. It is harder to recognize that the story?s premise was totally boneheaded and shouldn?t have been written.
It took the legislature several months to realize the computer services sales tax was a boneheaded mistake that could permanently cost the state jobs and economic momentum. Few people outside the industry knew how embedded its services are in every company large and small.
Another mistake?
In Saturday?s debates, delegates wondered whether they were substituting the mistake of a millionaires tax for the error of the tech tax.
The 6,500 households affected have an average income of $3 million and would pay an average of $17,000 more a year ? $51,000 over three years. One school of thought is that this is not enough to go to the trouble of selling an expensive home in Potomac and hustling over to Great Falls, Va., or quitting Baltimore County?s horse country for Pennsylvania.
But what if $17,000 a year is the straw that breaks the camel?s back, on top of the more than $150,000 in state income taxes they already pay? The top tax rate on their incomes was raised 16 percent in November (a rate of 4.75 to 5.50), and now it is to go up another 14 percent (to 6.25) ? 30 percent. What if just 5 percent of these folks flee ? only 325 households ? over the next three years? Maryland would lose about $50 million in state income taxes.
Gov. Martin O?Malley points out that Washington has given these millionaires big tax cuts. But House Republican Whip Christopher Shank points out that 1 percent of the top earners now pay 28 percent of Maryland?s taxes; the top 20 percent of earners pay two-thirds of state revenues.
Reporters are blamed
Sen. Nathaniel McFadden chided reporters for failing to report on all the “cuts” O?Malley and the legislature made in the budget in the past 15 months. The legislature?s fiscal chief said those reductions came to more than $1 billion.
“That won?t ever make it into the newspaper,” McFadden complained. As he fumed, he rapidly inflated those cuts to $1.5 billion, which eventually ballooned to $2.5 billion.
McFadden must be reading the wrong newspaper. He clearly missed The Examiner stories on the $280 million in reductions last summer, and the $300 million in reduced spending mandates in the special session, the 500 vacant jobs eliminated plus $250 million in recommended cuts. Then there was the front-page headline three weeks ago about $500 million more “slashed.”
After all these “cuts,” though, the budget still went up more than $1 billion in each of the past two years.
