The governors of Maryland
and Kansas
were singled out in the national press today for being polar opposites in
their respective approaches to taxing and spending. In this article by Michael Cooper in The
New York Times the reporter writes that “the proper balance between taxing
and spending has been raging in Congress, on the presidential campaign trail
and in statehouses around the country, and no two states have settled it more
differently this year than Maryland and Kansas, whose fiscal years began July 1.”
The Kansas guv “was
persuaded that his state needed to cut its income taxes and taxes on small businesses
significantly when he studied data from the Internal Revenue Service that
showed that Kansas
was losing residents to states with lower taxes.”
Many have made the same argument about our neighboring states
but our guv takes a very different tack. He was quoted from an address he gave
last month at the Maryland Municipal League annual convention.
“How much less research and development would be good for
the innovation economy that we have an obligation and a responsibility, a duty
and an imperative, to embrace? How many fewer hungry Maryland kids can we afford to feed?
Progress is a choice: we can decide whether to make the tough choices necessary
to invest in our shared future and move forward together. Or we can be the
first generation of Marylanders to give our children a lesser quality of life
with fewer opportunities.”
Coincidentally, I also came across this story by G. Scott
Thomas in The Business Journals which ranked how well the individual states
have recovered in employment since the recession began in 2007. He writes that
nine states and DC, “have recovered all of the jobs they lost during the
recession.”
The number one state was Texas, led by a Repub guv and the
number two state was New York, led by a Dem. Below the top ten were 41 other states that have yet to recover their recession employment losses. Kansas was 21 and Maryland was 23.
At that far down in the rankings you’d have to call it a draw.
That being said, I smiled when I noticed the dateline on The
New York Times story. It was Ocean City , Md. Kansas
may rank two places higher than us in State Nonfarm Employment but it doesn’t
have a beach town to file a story from.
That’s gotta count for something.
