Maryland Senate Democrats Favor Across-The-Board Hike To Personal Income Taxes

Maryland Senate Democrats have coalesced around a plan to jettison Gov. Martin O’Malley’s array of proposed tax increases on six-figure earners in favor of a simpler, but no less controversial, across-the-board hike to Marylanders’ personal income taxes.

A majority of the Senate’s Budget and Taxation Committee, which could vote on the plan as early as this week, said in interviews Friday that they have felt too much public resistance to O’Malley’s (D) plan to cut the state’s structural deficit by capping personal deductions and exemptions for residents making $100,000 or more.

O’Malley’s proposal has been derided by homeowners groups and lobbyists for real-estate agents and home builders. They have cast it as the first step toward the state doing away with mortgage-interest deductions, widely considered one of the largest financial incentives to homeownership.

Sen. Edward J. Kasemeyer (D-Baltimore County), the budget committee’s chair, said that the panel is working to finalize proposed rate increases and that they would hit high-income earners more than low-income earners.

According to several sources, the committee is likely to propose changes that would amount to roughly a quarter-of-a-percent increase to most residents’ state tax bills, a proposal likely to meet resistance in the House of Delegates, where there is strong support for a plan similar to O’Malley’s.

The Senate’s proposal would add up annually to a couple of hundred dollars in additional taxes for Maryland’s high-middle-income earners and much more for its millionaires and the ultra-rich, according to one estimate. Low-income earners may pay as little as $30 extra a year.

don’t want to work your life to pay for others stuff?

leave the state

simple.

florida and texas have 0% state income tax and florida has a 6% sales tax.

of course, the real tax problem you cannot escape even if you leave the country. federal income tax on your WORLD WIDE income. it pays for all those leftist states that drive up entitlement programs and cannot fund them using income or sales tax at the state level.

yes, you read that right. all those socialists in CA, NY, IL, MA, VT, etc that are pushing big govt give-aways are being funded by FEDERAL income taxes on every one
such bs

Are you sure those figures are right? I heard we already pay 41 cents per gallon in Maryland and they want to raise it to 75 cents. Gosh, I actually hope you are right.

Actually, it turns out that the current gas tax is 23.5 cents per gallon - but at $4/gal, and if O'Malley gets the 6% sales tax to it, $4/gal gas would cost $4.24. Thats 47.5 cents tax per gallon - not including federal tax.

The 6% tax would be phased in 2% at a time for three years ...

How about across=the-board layoffs of state workers? How about welshing on pension obligations?

Here is another plan the legislature is considering:

They have conjured legislation that would force jurisdictions such as Montgomery County to divert tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to one, and only one, area of local government: schools.

The legislation would empower the state to seize local tax revenue and redirect it exclusively to inflate school budgets — mainly meaning teacher salaries, pensions and benefits. It would do so even if it meant overriding voter-adopted property tax limits or raiding funds for police, fire departments, libraries, parks and transportation. Montgomery and some other counties, which already spend more than half their budgets on schools, would be largely stripped of their discretion to set spending priorities.

In Montgomery alone, it would shift an additional $18 million to $129 million in local tax dollars to schools next year. That’s more than the county schools superintendent has requested, or says he needs, in a proposed $2.1 billion budget for fiscal 2013. That budget already includes pay increases for teachers well beyond those being offered to police officers, firefighters or other county government employees.

The legislation is being promoted by teachers unions. They are angry that a handful of fiscally strapped localities, foremost among them Montgomery, have avoided state-mandated increases in school spending, based on enrollment growth, the past few years.

The issue has its roots in a law, enacted a decade ago, that pumped some $1.3 billion in new spending into public schools. To ensure that local governments would not slack off while the state stepped up, lawmakers required localities to maintain their own spending on schools — or increase it if enrollment rose.

In practice, many local governments funneled more to schools than the state required; in the past decade, Montgomery spent some $576 million over and above the state’s “maintenance of effort” formula. Some 90 percent of the county’s school spending went to personnel, mainly teacher salaries, pensions and benefits.

This stuff makes my head want to explode. No way do I want to pay an increased state income tax!

However, compared to the class warfare plan of the Maryland House, this is better. If income taxes must be raised, raise them on everybody. All tax-hike mongers deserve to be miserable, not just the rich ones. Share the pain.

Maryland “Freak State” PING!

He should raise our income taxes, he has to fund important investments like college for illegals.

Instead of a new tax on earners over $100K [O'Malley's plan], the legislature is now considering a 0.25% tax increase on ALL MD residents.

check out:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/md-politics/maryland-senate-democrats-favor-across-the-board-income-tax-increase/2012/03/03/gIQAdh2SpR_story.html

Add to that, the $2/month hike in electric bills for "wind farms, a possible tripling of the "flush tax", increases in "fees" for boat registration ...

And this DOES NOT include LOCAL tax increases that may be due to the state tossing back 50% of the teachers' pensions to the counties ...

All told, I hear that it might add $700 to the average MD resident's tax bill ...

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