THE
LATEST ANTHONY BROWN COMMERCIAL
Gubernatorial
candidate and Lt. Governor Anthony Brown posted an online commercial
this week, attacking Doug Gansler by contrasting clips of Gansler
saying we can't afford universal Pre-K in Maryland, and criticizing
Gansler's proposal to lower the corporate tax rate to match
the rate in Virginia. I'm not re-posting the video, because
I don't want to propagate misleading information.
First
of all, it's not a given that we can't do both, but Governor
O'Malley and the Lt. Governor have not done a sufficient job
of explaining how they are going to pay for pre-k for all children.
It is not acceptable to add any additional expense to the State
budget that would require an additional source of revenue. Anything
new added to the budget at this point must be paid for by making
an equal or greater budget cut elsewhere. We do not have unlimited
funds to pay every new program we may want to do.
For
the second issue covered in the commercial, it is not a corporate
giveaway as the Lt. Governor suggests. Attorney General Gansler
is instead saying that we are losing corporations, and therefore
jobs to Virginia, and that he would like the State of Maryland
to be able to compete on equal terms. If a corporation chooses
to locate in Virginia instead of Maryland, or even worse if
a corporation leaves Maryland, we get ZERO tax revenue from
that corporation. We also lose the revenue we would get from
the employees working for that corporation.
If
we really can't do both, it is far more devastating for a child
to be in a household where his or her parents are unemployed,
than it is to not go through pre-school. The financial problems
a household experiences from any extended period of unemployment
exposes children to a level of turmoil that can have a dramatic
impact on their performance in school. The likelihood of divorce
in a household having financial problems is far higher, usually
preceded by years of arguments. Incidents of domestic violence
are much more frequent in these households as well.
The
video from the Brown campaign spins the issues very effectively,
but we need to start looking beyond commercials and sound bites
to examine the real consequences of anything candidates propose.
Maryland's budget has increased more than a billion dollars
a year over the last eight years (more than two billion a year
from 2013 to 2015), and the business climate in the State has
become less and less favorable. Neither of these trends is sustainable.
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