The Seventh State of Denial
The folks over at The Seventh State like to pretend that they’re independent Democratic activists, but in reality they’re doing a poor job of being the outlet for Democratic spin.
In their latest efforts, David Lublin tries to spin a fairy tale that Governor Hogan’s decision to give $20 million is somehow related to his decision to not spend $25 million on education funding.
What Lublin knows of course but refuses to note are the following things:
- As noted yesterday, the $6.1 million that Lublin calls “Governor Hypocrite” for not spending was originally in Governor Hogan’s budget and that it was Democrats who decided to play games with the money. If they didn’t play games, the Aging Schools Fund would be fully funded.
- The $20 million was proposed by the Governor in February and approved by the General Assembly. This money was proposed before the General Assembly approved the extension of the existing $37.5 million in tax credits. The approval of those tax credits was a high priority of Senate President Mike Miller.
- As always, Lublin joins his fellow Democrats as trying to whitewash the fact that the shifting of teacher pensions to the counties was another long-time pet project of Mike Miller and championed by Martin O’Malley. Lublin tries to play off the $19 million in transfers to counties for pensions costs as a slight by Governor Hogan against “fully-funding” education costs when in reality counties have a shortfall in education funding because Democrats abruptly transferred the pension costs to counties in order to cover shortfalls in the state budget thanks to reckless spending by O’Malley and the rest of General Assembly Democrats.
- None of these things would even change the fact that the money for Northrup Grumman and the money for education are two entirely different pots of money that are complete unrelated. You can’t just spend money budgeted for one thing on another.
I hope Lublin shows more intellectual curiosity and honesty as a Professor than he does on this piece. Because Lublin either doesn’t know or fails to note that all of the money discussed in this piece, the $20 million Northrup Grumman tax credit request, the $37.5 million tax credit extension, and the $6.1 million in discretionary spending for the Aging Schools Fund were all approved by an overwhelming number of Democrats. If Lublin has beef with the discretionary authority given to the Governor on pensions and on the Aging School fund, his beef is with the Democrats who concocted this political scheme. If Lublin’s mad about corporate welfare he should be blaming Mike Miller, not Larry Hogan.
Regardless, Lublin’s attempts to regurgitate the Democratic talking points on education shows how desperate liberals are to cover up their attempts to harm public school funding and to gloss over Governor Hogan’s record funding for K-12 education.
