Transportation Secretary John Porcari on Thursday cranked to din the noise level generated by Maryland officials calling for revenue increases to eliminate the projected $1.5 billion structural deficit.
“To be able to build the kind of transportation system we want,” he said to a group assembled to discuss how to best manage an influx of an estimated 1.5 million people to Maryland over the next 25 years, “we are going to have to have a revenue increase.” He did not offer suggestions for how to achieve it. But we?re going to predict higher taxes.
There have been so many calls for the state?s dire need for a “revenue increase” of late we wonder if it is not an orchestrated campaign from the party running the state government to make higher taxes more palatable to residents by the time legislators address the issue either in a special session or next year.
Repeat the mantra enough and people will just take it as truth seems to be the plan.
Earlier this month Comptroller Peter Franchot stoked the higher taxes PR campaign with his warning that the drop in sales tax revenue in March from February, the first in four years, could presage a slowdown in the economy. “Should that turn out to be the case, the decisions required to resolve the structural deficit by the end of the 2008 legislative session will be that much more difficult,” he said.
Since Franchot said in March that the state would not be able to “grow our way out of the structural deficit mess we find ourselves in,” it only leaves, in his view, one alternative: Higher taxes.
The list goes on of public officials repeating that we need a “revenue increase” slogan. But nothing is inevitable. Alternatives exist to raising taxes, such as trimming the budget. Is funding the perpetually money losing Rocky Gap Lodge and Golf Resort really a good idea, for example? Evenbetter, legislators could tackle structural reforms to state services including health care, estimated to drain 20 percent of the state?s budget by 2011, and pass slots legislation. Passing slots could potentially generate hundreds of millions for the state treasury.
We did not elect our current leaders to attempt to brainwash us into believing higher taxes are our only fate. Until they can prove no waste exists in state government, Marylanders should reject fatalistic predictions and lobby against tax increases.
