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November 16, 2006
Maryland's fiscal woes to linger
Gov.-elect Martin O'Malley will face fiscal problems nearly as dire as those endured by Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., with state spending expected to outpace tax receipts by more than $1 billion a year for the foreseeable future without major policy changes, nonpartisan General Assembly analysts predicted yesterday.One of Ehrlich's major claims on the campaign trail was that he turned $4 billion in predicted deficits into a $2 billion surplus. That was true, but the report presented yesterday to the state Spending Affordability Committee indicates that the state's fiscal turnaround was a blip of good fortune masking a long-term, structural imbalance between revenues and spending that the Ehrlich administration did not fix.
This is just an example of what you get when you put a Republican in charge of your budget. I except to see the same kinds of financial failures with our new county executive. Republican economic changes cause short term jumps in the economy, but they are never sustainable and therefore those policies are doomed to failure. Once again the children have run the state into a hole and now it's the Democrats job to come in and take responsibility for saving the future. I really don't get why the voters can't figure that out. Take for instance this scenario, right now the Republicans in Congress are screaming about cutting the budget deficit in half, which actually means they have to cut their overspending in half, not counting their spending for the war. So you see if you want to know why the Republicans have added 5 trillion dollars to our national debt, it's because the war is being put on the national credit card, but the Republicans refuse to count that overspending against themselves. It's ridiculous. O'Malley is going to have to make some hard choices to secure the future of Maryland. Choices that the Republicans are incapable of making.
Read more over at Baltimore Sun.
Posted by Jamison at November 16, 2006 7:47 AM
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