Is Martin O’Malley on Drugs?

WaPo blogger John Wagner sure must be. To use O’Malley as the subject and “Fiscal Responsibility” as part of the predicate in almost any sentence indicates a severe break with reality. Perhaps acid is making a comeback on the Western Shore.

Wagner writes about a speech O’Malley recently gave at the Center for American Progress (a lefty think tank headed by former Clinton chief of staff John Podesta) where O’Malley described his high spending, tax raising ways as “fiscally responsible”.

O’Malley argued that, by cutting the state budget and raising taxes,
Maryland had taken an important step toward preserving its priorities
for future generations.

“When faced with a crippling structural deficit in Maryland, we
asked our neighbors to embrace, once again, the politics of posterity,”
O’Malley said, making use of a catchphrase that increasingly finds its
way into his public remarks.

The politics of posterity, he explained, is “the politics which
embraces the duty we have not only to our neighbors, but also to the
next generation.”

Trending: Thank You

O’Malley ticked off a long list of initiatives that he suggested
would not have been possible if not for the special session. Among
them: holding the line on college tuition for a third year in a row,
spending record amounts on public school construction, expanding
subsidized health insurance and knocking out a backlog of DNA samples
at a state lab.

You have to give O’Malley credit. Few politicians, even fewer real people, posses the sociopathic ability to stand before a group – even a friendly one – and make such statements. In one breath O’Malley claims to have cut spending – slowing the growth of spending isn’t the same Governor – while in another he boasts of spending more on all of the usual suspects. Personally, my favorite will always be O’Malley’s reference to the “structural deficit”. This time it’s a crippling structural deficit.

We all know that the “structural deficit” is hogwash. However, when I watched O’Malley explain it last year in Salisbury it was beautiful. Even O’Malley’s charts showed it for what it is:

• Democrats want to spend more.

• You can only raise taxes so much before you cripple the state’s economy.

• That pesky Maryland constitution requires a balanced budget.

Therefore – What the law won’t allow you to spend = the Structural Deficit

cross posted at Delmarva Dealings