This year’s Maryland state budget is a farce.  It was balanced largely on fund transfers (like stealing money from the oil spill disaster recovery fund), federal “stimulus” money,  and planning on the US Congress transferring millions of dollars to the states to boost Medicare/Medicaid payments.  Today, the fifth day of the new fiscal year, we are already in technical deficit on the budget.

O’Guvnah and his Dark Servants like to say “we’ve cut to the bone” and “we’ve made the hard choices”, but that just isn’t true.  We have yet to see a philosophical shift at the state level about spending, about hiring, about management.   Until that happens, we will be in perennial deficit.

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The leaders of the General Assembly are apparently pushing O’Guvnah Marty O’Malley to freeze state spending next year, in what the Baltimore Sun’s Laura Smitherman claims sends “a strong message that the legislature would not approve any big-ticket programs”. 

But here’s the rub:  the Spending Affordability Committee, a panel of but-kissing legislators from both the Senate and the House of Delegates, has proposed only a freeze on money the legislature controls.  That excludes spending involving federal funds.

I would say that doesn’t go far enough.  We already face a $2 billion shortfall in the 2011 fiscal year.  Combined with still-declining tax revenues, and an economy being kept alive only because of federal spending, I think that shortfall will actually be larger.  A better move would be to limit the state budget to 2010 actual tax collections, plus an additional five percent reduction in spending across the board.

Furthermore, the General Assembly should require that:

• The state approve no contracts with a period longer than five years excluding stadium leases;
• The Governor be required to call a Special Session if future tax collections require intra-session budget cuts greater than 10% OR furloughs/salary reductions of currently employed state employees as of 31 December 2009;
• The state be required to purchase energy from the cheapest and most affordable suppliers on the market, regardless of the source;
• The University System of Maryland raise out-of-state tuition substantially to cover budget shortfalls in the University System;
• The state refuse any federal stimulus dollars OR earmarks requiring state expenditures;
• All current taxes be given sunset dates requiring re-authorization within five years.

Of course, none of this will happen, because the left in this state is more interested in power.  And in Maryland, power flows from the purse, giving the most to those that don’t produce at the expense of those who do.

The past three years since the election of O’Guvnah Martin O’Malley have been quite illustrative in some of the major weaknesses of budgeting in Maryland.  It’s time that Maryland’s elected classes in Annapolis begin to come to terms with the facts on the ground, and not be lured by the siren song of power-hungry wet dreams when it comes to state finances and state budgeting.