“A C student can get this,” professor Martin O?Malley, freshman governor, assured a class of several dozen political science majors, faculty and university bigwigs as he rolled through a 50-minute lecture on his deficit-cutting tax package.
“I was a C student,” O?Malley told the group at the University Maryland, Baltimore County, library in Catonsville Wednesday, and while some say his plan “is complicated, it has a lot of moving parts,” he thinks most people understand it. Certainly, he told reporters afterward, “It?s not beyond the ability of the members of the General Assembly to understand and pass.”
The governor chose a campus to emphasize that half the $110 million in corporate income tax he is raising would be dedicated to colleges and universities to help keep tuition down. “Higher education could not have a better friend,” said University System Chancellor Brit Kirwan, who has served as an O?Malley cheerleader at several events.
Two students questioned why the increase in corporate tax is “quite small,” as Elani Odeyale, a junior from Anne Arundel County, put it.
O?Malley noted that corporations also pay the property tax and other liens, and the tax increase would bring them to at least $880 million. He also want a to close other corporate “loopholes.”
Howard County sophomore Michael Comberiate worried about 1-cent increase on the sales tax, and how it would raise the costs of books and other supplies students must buy.
O?Malley noted legislative efforts to exempt textbooks from the tax.
Another student asked why O?Malley was doubling the cigarette tax to both fund health care and also reduce smoking, meaning he?d need a new funding source as revenues declined. The governor said as tobacco tax revenues declined, slot-machine money would kick in. “There are few taxes that you can propose that a majority will support, and that is one of them,” O?Malley said.
At the mention of slots, a Baltimore City student asked how he could support slots, encouraging a vice. “That?s something I admit to being conflicted on myself,” O?Malley said. But many legislators are reluctant to “vote for taxes without closing that loophole” that allows slots revenues to flow to neighboring states.
