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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