Wednesday, April 1, 2015

MARTY O’MALLEY MADE A MESS OF MARYLAND…AND NOW HE WANTS TO MAKE AN EVEN A BIGGER MESS OF OUR COUNTRY…


Well, you wouldn’t know from listening to any of his many recent speeches as he goes about trying to portray himself as being the only logical alternative to Hitlery Clinton for 2016, but old Marty, here, accomplished little more than to turn the ‘People’s Republic of Maryland’ into a pretty big mess during his eight year tenure as governor.  But that fact seems to be having little effect in dampening, even in the slightest, his presidential aspirations.  But, as they say, the truth will eventually win out.  For instance, taxpayers abandoned his state in droves during his tenure as governor and in 2014, his final year in office as governor, Maryland had the second-highest foreclosure rate in the nation. Now he’s doing his best to ride this embarrassing record all the way to the White House.

It was during one of those speeches, this one at the Brookings Institution earlier in March, that Marty did a little test-drive of the kind of campaign rhetoric that I’m sure we’re going to be hearing a lot more of, if in fact he does decide to officially throw his hat in the 2016 presidential ring.  He said, “Behind all of our data, there are people, living their lives, shouldering their struggles. They deserve a government that works.”  Unfortunately, in the state that Marty governed for eight years, he gave deserving Marylanders anything but a state government that worked.  Today, Marylanders endure what is the real Marty legacy, and it ain’t pretty.  The folks of that state have been made to endure higher taxes, pink slips, process servers, tax liens, and foreclosures.

While Maryland can be said to be blessed with a relatively stable and well-paid federal presence thanks primarily to its key military installations and its close proximity to Washington, D.C., as well as one of the nation’s best seaports and logistical networks of railways and highways, it’s even with such a sound foundation that Marty succeeded in driving jobs and businesses out of his state.  And the result was one of the biggest electoral upsets of the 2014 election that had Maryland voters electing a Republican governor.  Marylanders bounced Marty’s heir apparent, Lieutenant Governor Anthony Brown, out of Annapolis and voted instead for Republican Larry Hogan, a guy who never before held elected office, to come in and clean up the mess left behind by Marty & Co..

In looking back at all of the damage done during the O’Malley-Brown years, what we find is a pile of 40 tax, fee, and toll increases that created an additional yearly tax burden of $3.1 billion on top of what Marylanders were already paying the day Marty was first elected.   Did this drive taxpayers out of Maryland? Not according to progressive orthodoxy, but the IRS measures changes in the tax base for every state and county in the nation.  During Marty’s first term, when the majority of new levies kicked in, Maryland accounted for the largest taxpayer exodus in the Mid-Atlantic region, more than 31,000 between 2007 and 2010. The tax base in Baltimore City, Maryland’s most populous city, declined the most: Its 1.4 percent decrease topped all other Maryland jurisdictions.

And so I think we can safely assume that it’s all thanks to Marty’s tax policy that Virginia has now become home to some 11,400 former Marylanders, who took 390 million taxable dollars across the Potomac with them between 2007 and 2010.  In only three of Marty’s eight years in office, Maryland lost more taxpayers than 43 other states. This mass-exodus cost Maryland a staggering $1.7 billion in taxable revenues.  Another telling measurement of Marty’s “accomplishments” is Maryland’s foreclosure rate. At the end of 2014, Maryland ranked second-highest in the nation in foreclosures. The Washington suburb of Prince George’s County had the largest share. This predominately black county supported Marty in both of his statewide races. He repaid the county with foreclosures and economic distress.

Environmental extremism is another one of Marty’s trademark issues. His “rain tax” (collected on quarterly water bills) made Maryland a national laughingstock.  Small businesses weren’t laughing, though, when their water bills skyrocketed in 2013. Baltimore’s elderly, struggling on fixed incomes and already pressed by crime and collapsing neighborhoods, now face liens thanks to the rain tax.  Marty also botched, and rather badly, an opportunity to validate big government with the implementation of Obamacare in Maryland.  Managed by none other than Lieutenant Governor Brown, the administration squandered millions on Maryland’s health exchange and then burned millions more to start over. Brown, like a true Democrat, passed the buck blaming appointed officials lower down the totem pole.

In 2007, Marty came into office on a promise of better, cleaner government — the same promise he made at Brookings this month. Instead, under eight years of Marty, quality of life in Maryland deteriorated, jobs and businesses fled to Virginia, workers were crushed by new taxation, and we saw chronic budget deficits.  As governor, Marty displayed none of the qualities of an effective national leader: devotion to the people, courage, and independence. Marty had an opportunity in Annapolis to convince Marylanders that he was such a leader. Today Maryland is poorer for the experience.   If Marty is elected president, count on more government, more taxation, more regulation, and a government even more detached from the Constitution than the current one is.

And even after all of this, it strikes me as being quite remarkable that Marty is still being touted by such publications as ‘The Hill’ as being a worthy candidate who Democrats should at least consider as being an alternative to Hitlery Clinton.  In fact it’s this very leftist publication than makes the idiotic claim that it’s Marty’s list of accomplishments and his leadership skills that actually far surpass those of Hitlery.  Now I ask you, after experiencing all that we have over the course of the last six years, and with two more left for us to survive, is there anything about the man of whom we have been talking about here that would indicate that he possess a list of accomplishments or has demonstrated the necessary leadership skill that in any way make him deserving of being elected president?

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