“Disproportionately Benefits”
More brilliance from Andrew Kujan. From his anger over the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee lowering O’Malley’s income tax rate for the “rich:”
Mongomery [sic] already DISPROPORTIONATELY BENEFITS from government programs in Maryland? I suppose the wealth in Montgomery is just happenstance, and has little to do with well maintained infrastructure, quality public schools, etc.
Disproportionately benefits? Not so, according to Blair Lee:
Montgomery County is the home of 41 percent of Maryland’s families with incomes over $250,000, Montgomery will generate 81 percent of the new state revenues. That’s right, Montgomery County — with 16.5 percent of the state’s population — will pay 81 percent of the state’s $163 million income tax increase. Baltimore city and Prince George’s County taxpayers will actually pay less than they’re currently paying…
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In this year’s legislative session, Montgomery asked for $40.5 million for community college projects. We got $1.2 million. We requested $65 million for a new courthouse and got nothing. We got $52 million for school construction but so did Baltimore city with 40 percent fewer students. And once again we didn’t get the $30 million of Thornton school aid we bargained for back in 2002 because, somehow, our money was made discretionary instead of mandatory. So, with 17 percent of the state’s school kids, we get 8.6 percent of the Thornton money. Thanks to Thornton, Baltimore now spends more per pupil than Montgomery yet Baltimore taxpayers pay only 19 percent of the city’s school budget while Montgomery taxpayers pay 80 percent of theirs. All in the name of fairness.
How Kujan can say that MoCo disproportionately benefits while simultaneously footing most of the bill for the rest of the state and getting less in return for their “investments” is beyond me. Then again he has a tin ear for economic facts.
Lost in his ranting about the “rich” Kujan fails to realize that a great deal of working families will get hosed by the income tax increase. Married couples with children that earn $200K or more are considered “rich” even though they are working families. For example, my wife and I, together, earn just enough, to fall into that new tax bracket, and we have one child. After paying a mortgage on a modest row home, day care, two car payments (we both need them to get to work), rising gas prices, school loans, rising BGE rates, groceries and other essentials etc… what is left over at the end of the month doesn’t really qualify us as “rich.” If we were “rich,” we wouldn’t, you know, need to work.
Ironically, we own the same Volvo SUV as Bonnie and Halsey Frost, but not the additional Chevy Suburban and Ford F-250 they also own. So, is my family a “working family” or are the Frost’s “rich.”
crossposted on The Main Adversary
