“Shovel ready” is headed for the “slippery slope” and destined to join “at the end of the day” in the gallery of deathless prose. In Maryland and probably elsewhere, “structural deficit” long ago should have received its own pedestal next to its durable sibling “disingenuous.”
For Maryland politicians and their pliable followers, “structural deficit” has had a particularly useful career as a means to disguise the splendid fact that since World War II Maryland has benefited, as no other state, from the relentless, uninterrupted growth of the federal government — National Institutes of Health, Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, National Security Agency, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Homeland Security. É Fiscal responsibility in Maryland is oxymoronic. In fact, with unremitting federal largesse, it is viewed by most legislators as unnecessary as evidenced by the $1.3 billion Thornton education bill.
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The Thornton Commission, named for its chairman, Alvin Thornton, sought to address disparities in educational spending across Maryland’s 24 jurisdictions. But legislators didn’t earmark a funding source. And there was no performance requirement for a system that had shown no correlation between increased spending on education and increased student performance — not in decades. When a prominent state senator who touted the bill was asked for the source of a revenue stream to pay for the $1.3 million program, she replied “We always find funds for big programs after we adopt them.” Much the same reply was given by Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend when asked how she would rectify the ominous debt she, if elected governor, would inherit from Gov. Parris Glendening. Such glib funding schemes and poor judgment are not out of the ordinary in the Maryland General Assembly. “Maryland is a rich state” our politicians have told us for a generation. Cutting costs or arranging priorities is for rogues. Taxes are pure of heart, painless, and patriotic.
Here are a few of the other unfunded mandates imposed on Maryland’s future: The 10 percent income tax of the 1990s without corresponding cuts, Medicaid, teacher’s pension funds, state employee health care and pension benefits ($30 billion off the books and unacknowledged as reported in this column; see “The Pain is Yet to Come,” Nov. 11, 2008). With one exception, this last item may equal the bodacious Venus flytrap, Audrey, with the insatiable appetite (“Feed me! Feed me!”) in the 1986 film, “Little Shop of Horrors.” The one, and possibly only exception, is the unknowable tax burden associated with the eventual costs of global warming as yet inadequately defined and so far seriously deficient regarding official estimates of costs, benefits, and representations about job growth and claimed savings of $2 billion.
So much for the high-value targets. This is not to belittle what’s next because it and many things like it are insidious and pervade state government.
By no means anecdotal is the process for raising teachers’ pensions — exalted by the teachers’ unions. Although teachers’ salaries are paid by the counties, 100 percent of their pensions are paid by the state. Higher county-driven salaries require correspondingly higher pensions paid by the state. Counties would have less money to negotiate salaries if they had to pay pensions, too. Neither the governor nor the legislature can reject the pension increases. Therefore, there are no consequences for the governor or legislature who raises the pensions. Successive waves of government repeat the same thing, and this is one of many ways the state budget grows inexorably and without accountability or redress. All that is required for the state is a balanced budget. And this year the state is counting on receiving $350 million from the federal government to do so. Such is the maw of government.
Since the early 1980s in Maryland, there has been a steady decline in the number of part-time, citizen legislators with experience mainly in some aspect of business. Their historic presence has been filled increasingly with career, full-time legislators — particularly legislators whose principal, often only, life experience is in local, state, or federal government. So, don’t tell them government is the problem. With Maryland’s increasingly governmental makeup of legislature and the state’s many government enterprises, a warning from Milton Friedman, although aimed at America as a whole, is worth considering:
“With so large a defense, space, and research budget as we now have, the federal government has become essentially the only purchaser of the products of many enterprises and whole industries. This raises very serious problems for the preservation of a free society. É.”
There are many political and economic pitfalls that Americans must guard against to insure their liberties. The first line of defense is a resolute business sector and the leadership and discipline it can impose — if it has the will and doesn’t hide within perfunctory organizations.
Robert O.C. Worcester is president of Maryland Business for Responsive Government (mbrg.org).
