O’Malley’s Blind Ambition

For as long as I can remember, and as long as he has held higher office, Democratic Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley has wanted to be president. Every move as mayor of Baltimore, as governor of Maryland and as chairman of the Democratic Governors Association has been calculated to win a Democratic primary in 2016. So instead of caring about the needs of Marylanders and leveraging our state’s assets to create prosperity, Mr. O'Malley has treated Marylanders like guinea pigs, pushing a far-left economic agenda in hopes of impressing the liberal establishment and activists in early-primary states. Now, like many of the bailed-out Wall Street banks, Maryland is nothing more than a “zombie state” - an entity with deficits as far as the eye can see, a private sector on life support and a bloated government workforce dependent upon federal funding.

When Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. left office in 2007, the state had a $1.4 billion budget surplus and nearly full employment and was a place where private-sector businesses thrived. Mr. O'Malley, after his first 18 months in office, destroyed all of those successes. He passed massive tax increases on retail sales and income. He signed the first ever “millionaire’s tax,” which forced thousands of affluent residents to flee Maryland and take their assets with them. He created the “tech tax” on information-technology companies, proposed a “fitness tax” on local gyms and has sought to index the gas tax. The poisonous combination of these tax increases has driven 2,500 Maryland businesses to close their doors and lay off more than 200,000 workers. The simple truth is that individual prosperity and business growth are destitute here in Maryland thanks to Mr. O'Malley. He isn’t fighting for hardworking taxpayers; he is fighting to appeal to intellectual liberals who tend to vote in the Iowa caucuses.

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