Politics & Opinion
Taxing Marylanders Into A State Of Dependence |
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Wednesday, 08 February 2012 10:07
By Scott Davis
We’re headed from being the “free state” to being “the welfare state.” Martin O’Malley, the new President of the Democratic Governor’s Association, is determined to strut his stuff on the national stage, demonstrating for President Obama how to bring a once proud state to its knees to bow before the altar of government.
Once a majority of the people is getting a check from politicians, freedom becomes a dim memory. Government salaries, pensions, unemployment benefits, welfare...how can the average citizen decline such an offer? It would be a lie to tell yourself you’re still free once you’ve taken a bite of the poison apple. They own you. You have become a cog in their system. And that’s just the way they want it.In O’Malley’s Maryland, politically expedient friends like Richard Stewart are appointed to high-profile positions in the Maryland Stadium Authority, and the exclusive five-member Governor’s Redistricting Advisory Committee.
It turns out Richard Stewart, who ran a construction company called Montgomery Mechanical Services before he helped redistrict Anne Arundel County off the political map, has pled guilty to tax evasion for failing to pay almost $4 million in federal taxes from 2003 to 2008. During the same period, this former chair of Governor O’Malley’s re-election campaign for Prince George’s County dispersed political contributions of $73,320 around the state of Maryland. His largest benefactors were Governor Martin O’Malley, Lt. Governor Anthony Brown, and the Maryland Democratic Party.
When it comes to re-election efforts, Barack Obama's 2012 campaign website identifies one Jon Corzine of Hoboken, New Jersey, as having raised at least $500,000. That’s the same multi-millionaire John Corzine whose firm, MF Global of Wall Street, made $1.2 billion dollars in customer money disappear. The disgraced former Goldman Sachs CEO is one of our President’s top fundraisers.
But wait a minute. Obama and O’Malley say they’re a friend to the 99 percent. Yet at every turn they cultivate wealthy friends with your money. Remember, Warren Buffet and George Soros are friends of Obama. So are the owners of bankrupt Solyndra, that got a $535 million government-backed loan from Obama’s tax-payer financed $859 billion economic stimulus program. Do you know who benefitted from Obama’s rejection of the Keystone Oil Pipeline? Not the American people starving for lower gas prices, but Warren Buffet’s Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad that will haul oil by railcar. What’s next? George Soros delivering oil by horse and buggy?
If you have heard about O’Malley’s plan to shift half the burden of teacher pension costs from the state onto county governments, or O’Malley’s plan to allocate $373 million towards school construction, you might think members of the mainstream press should be asking if Richard Stewart’s Montgomery Mechanical Services ever worked on school construction projects. The tax increases that O’Malley has planned will do nothing to improve the public education system. An educated younger generation is the enemy of autocratic rulers. They would be able to tell when the emperor has no clothes.
The behavior of Maryland’s political class begs the question: Is it “who you know” or “what you know” that’s more important? Should we teach our children the advantages of establishing insider connections with men like Richard Stewart, or is it better to acquire tangible skills and practical knowledge through hard work and ingenuity?
The answer is that in the O’Malley/Obama model for society, there will be the (1 percent) wealthy political class that has achieved its status through insider connections and the dependent (99 percent) masses who have been taxed and “educated” into submission.
