Governor Martin O’Malley (D-MD) and the democrat controlled Maryland legislature passed a budget package last night in a special session.  It will raise state taxes on residents earning more than $100,000.  Forty percent of the increase would be carried by Montgomery County where 1 in 4 taxpayers would feel the pinch.  Those earning over $250,000 (joint filers over $300k) would have a state tax rate of 5.75% and those earning over $200,000 would have all exemptions eliminated.

Apparently, the departure of 1/3 of the millionaires in Maryland after the millionaire tax was enacted and the recent reversal by Britain with their millionaire tax didn’t phase the Maryland democrats.  So now they are going forward with a $100K-earner tax.

Peter Franchot, Maryland Comptroller, blasted the Maryland leaders saying, “The worst thing we can do to a struggling, consumer-powered economy is dig deeper into the pockets of consumers who are already experiencing a financial strain.”  The governor’s office touted the nearly $600 million in cuts from the FY2012 budget, but a significant portion of these “cuts” are accounting gimmicks that include the shifting of the teacher pension costs to the counties.

Keep in mind that Maryland allows its counties to apply a “piggyback tax” where each county assesses a tax on your taxable income – generally in the neighborhood of 3%.  And we are a place where a ballot initiative that would limit the county government’s ability to raise property taxes at the same time the piggyback tax rate is increased failed.

GorT might need to look at relocating because fighting the good fight in the land of the stupid just gets frustrating sometimes.  I wonder just how much blowback this will cause in the next few elections when Marylanders feel the pinch of the new, higher taxes.

GorT

GorT is an eight-foot-tall robot from the 51ˢᵗ Century who routinely time-travels to steal expensive technology from the future and return it to the past for retroinvention. The profits from this pay all the Gormogons’ bills, including subsidizing this website. Some of the products he has introduced from the future include oven mitts, the Guinness widget, Oxy-Clean, and Dr. Pepper. Due to his immense cybernetic brain, GorT is able to produce a post in 0.023 seconds and research it in even less time. Only ’Puter spends less time on research. GorT speaks entirely in zeros and ones, but occasionally throws in a ڭ to annoy the Volgi. He is a massive proponent of science, technology, and energy development, and enjoys nothing more than taking the Czar’s more interesting scientific theories, going into the past, publishing them as his own, and then returning to take credit for them. He is the only Gormogon who is capable of doing math. Possessed of incredible strength, he understands the awesome responsibility that follows and only uses it to hurt people.