Middle Class An Endangered Species In Maryland by Frederick Meekins

Middle Class An Endangered Species In Maryland by Frederick Meekins

Posted by The Bear under Taxes , Culture

With the reassertion of the monopoly of the Democratic Party over Maryland politics which for the previous four years had been what amounted to a party-and-a-half system, the jurisdiction jokingly referred to as “the Free State” is well on its way to becoming a socialist nightmare where only the hyper-rich or the fashionably impoverished having suppressed their own dignity to enjoy a life of entitlement program luxury will be able to eke out an existence there.

In my column “People’s Republic Of Maryland Taxing Its Subjects Into Submission”, I wrote about plans to enact legislation that will end up costing motorists about $2000 more just to purchase an automobile so that new vehicles in the state will be in compliance with California emission standards Now plans are being announced to sock residents even harder in the gut all in the name of protecting the environment.

According to the Green Fund Proposal, developers would be accessed a fee of $0.25 per square foot for any impervious surface that water cannot percolate through such as a roof or driveway. And the fee can go up as high as $2.00 per square foot for structures built outside of designated growth areas. Theoretically those in the market for a new home could be levied a fee as high as $20,000 according to a Match 6, 2007 Maryland Daily Record article titled “Debate Heats Up Over Green Fund Fee”. One does not have to hold an endowed professorship in Economics to realize that developers are not going to absorb this fee out of their own sense of philanthropy but rather pass it along to homebuyers.

Those favoring this kind of nonsense locked away in their gated communities or on their palatial estates will condescendingly snort that, even if the fee is as high as $20,000, it is a small price to pay for environmental restoration (the latest bureaucratic euphemism for spending increases as the monies will go to pay farmers to plant winter cover crops and to further bloat agencies such as the state departments of agriculture and the environment). Of course, it might not seem so much when you make in a week what the average person makes in a year but it is a significant chunk of change when you are saddled with a 30 year mortgage on a house pushing nearly $500,000.

With taxes in some Maryland counties pushing $3000 a year and projected to go as high as $6000 by 2010, one must ask what in Sheol’s nomenclature is being done with all that money. Isn’t it about time tax revenue went for actual needs such as this alleged crisis of restoring the Chesapeake Bay rather than for things that should be private sector expenses such as “Shakespeare In The Park” festivals paid for from funds provided by the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, the City of Hyattsville, and the Hyattsville Community Development Corporation (all entities having the same people unfortunate enough to reside in their respective jurisdictions) and African vacations euphemistically categorized as “trade missions” for petty yet self-important local officials that in the end are about transferring still more resources out of the United States into the hands of deceitful bureaucrats and even more maniacal tyrants.

There is more of course to the exorbitant extraction of revenue to fund questionable government programs or even to transfer resources from those deemed by the elite to have to those alleged to have not. For whenever social engineers invoke what they have labeled the lofty goal of income redistribution, is has nothing whatsoever to do about elevating the downtrodden but about dragging the average American down to that level of destitution.

Though they need to stop and think who will be left to do their menial labor for them unless the next phase of their grandiose development plans include massive relocation camps where laborers will be imported from abroad and warehoused sight unseen away from the lords of the new order like human livestock and beasts of burden, those once considered parts of the working and lower middle classes will find virtually no place in the brave new Maryland on the drawing board. For example, in Hyattsville, Maryland planners are conniving to shed the municipality’s image as a suburban haven just outside Washington, DC for blue collar tradesmen and low level government functionaries to that of a hovel for artists (with government subsidized housing for those types insisting upon smearing elephant dung on portraits of the Virgin Mary, submerging crosses in jars of urine, or other assorted blasphemies and obscenities that would not otherwise find support in a free marketplace and claiming its fine art) and cramped townhouses pushing half a million dollars for the uppercrust that get a buzz living in squalor sheek all the rage these days among the effete.

Communist revolutions around the world came into power promising to create a classless society. However, what they put into place was a system where all but a tiny elite were suppressed equally. Back then, such regimes accomplished their diabolical agendas through violence and fear.

For the moment, the ideological heirs of those that believe the flames of liberty must be extinguished and the aspirations of the individual curtailed for the alleged good of humanity have grown more sophisticated in their methods of getting the people to comply with their agenda. However, as Americans draw ever closer to the breaking point of just how much they are willing to put up with as frankly we are fast approaching the threshold where there is precious little left for the state to steal, we must ask with concern will the aspiring despots among us resort to the violent tendencies of their philosophical progenitors in the attempt to bring about socialism’s ultimate triumph.

RELATED -From Absurd Report.

Sat 19 May 2007

Congress Passes Gigantic Tax Hike

Posted by The Bear under Taxes

Congress just passed the FY 2008 budget totaling $2.9 trillion. It also contains the second largest tax hike in U.S. history!!!!

The House passed it 214-209. There were 13 Democrats who joined all Republicans in voting against the resolution.

The Senate passed it 52-40. Two Republicans (Snowe and Collins) voted with all the Democrats in support of the bill. Seven Republicans did not vote.

(The link on the vote totals will give you how each Congress person voted.)

Congressman Paul Ryan, the ranking member of the House Budget Committee, provides a great overview of what this budget does.

I believe that the Democrats’ FY08 budget represents an enormous missed opportunity, and sets a disastrous course for our nation’s fiscal and economic future.

First: The key – and seemingly only – fiscal policy of this budget is to raise taxes. If it stays within the scope of the House and Senate bills, this budget will impose on the American economy and American workers either the largest tax increase in our nation’s history, or the second largest tax increase in our nation’s history.

One of the most frustrating parts of our debates on the House budget was the Democrats’ dogged insistence that they are NOT raising taxes – pointing to some language they threw in there saying that they hope not to take this course. But a budget is numbers, and their numbers don’t lie. They unequivocally show a tax hike in the House of $400 billion, and a tax hike in the Senate of over $200 billion.

Even the Washington Post found the Majority’s claim inconsistent with the facts, noting that the House budget raises taxes nearly $400 billion; the Senate budget raises them more than $200 billion – the latter of which my House Democratic colleagues appeared to commit to following our motion to instruct on the floor this week.

But I’d hardly consider a $200 billion tax hike a “win” for American workers.

The Majority’s enormous tax hike will clearly threaten the economic and fiscal progress our nation has made these the past several years. As I’ve said many times before, the tax relief that we passed in 2001 and 2003 has turned this economy around and brought us out of a recession. It has improved job growth, GDP growth, the unemployment rate, business investment, and the entire market. In addition, it has led to surging revenues coming into the federal treasury. Raising taxes would threaten to reverse all of this.

And just think of the impact that tax hike will have on our small businesses. Our small businesses, who already have the second highest tax burden in the industrialized world, will be told that they are just not paying enough. In this increasingly global economy, where these companies are struggling to compete with China and India, imposing an even larger tax burden will be crushing. It will severely threaten our ability to compete – led alone lead.

Second: This budget does absolutely nothing to control spending. At every opportunity, the Majority has chosen to increase spending – they increased discretionary spending by $6 billion in this year’s omnibus appropriations bill; they’re proposing another $20 billion or so of extraneous spending in the supplemental; and now, the House budget would increase discretionary spending by $26 billion in FY08.

For all the talk we’ve heard about how the Democrats have to “clean up” what they call the “fiscal mess” Republicans left them, their only response seems to be spend more and tax more. This formula has never worked for getting control of the budget, and it won’t work now.

Finally, the Democrats’ budget not only avoids any effort to address the unsustainable growth of federal entitlement spending for at least the next five years, but in fact, actually compounds the problem, by including in so-called “reserve funds,” promises to add another $150 billion in NEW entitlement spending – without, of course, any way to pay for it.

They’ve chosen to do this even after a parade of highly respected witnesses – including the U.S. Comptroller General, CBO Director, OMB Director, and Chairman of the Federal Reserve – warned us that the path of entitlement spending threatens to devastate both the budget and the economy.

Even with the $400-billion tax increase included in the House-passed budget, entitlement spending will quickly outpace revenue again, and by increasing amounts. We cannot raise taxes fast enough, or often enough, to deal with this unsustainable growth in spending.

So why has the Majority failed to do anything? Because, as Senate Budget Chairman Conrad recently put it on 60 Minutes, “it’s always easier not to. [I]t’s always easier to defer, to kick the can down the road to avoid making choices. You know, you get in trouble in politics when you make choices.”

I appreciate the sentiment, but we all know that’s not what budgeting is about. It’s about making choices – even when they’re tough, even when they’re not politically popular – because that’s what we’re here to do.

And again, I believe that the budgets we’ve seen fail to make any real choices – let alone the right ones.

Our House Republican budget PROVED that we can not only balance the budget – we can do it without raising taxes – by keeping our economy growing strong and creating jobs, and by restraining federal spending.

This Congress must work together to change the dangerous course the Democrats’ budgets appear poised to set, and craft a plan to better our nation’s future.

Source: The Club for Growth