Avoiding a tax increase this year from Annapolis will be like trying to stay dry while swimming.

Gov. Martin O'Malley has bombarded Marylanders with so many tax and fee hikes at least a few are bound to pass this legislative session. No doubt the laundry list of proposals that includes imposing a sales tax on gasoline, adding a sales tax for online purchases, at least doubling the "flush tax" and halving the personal exemption for some filers and eliminating it for others, are meant to shock and awe so that when only some proposals pass, it will seem like a victory for taxpayers.

As burdensome as these new taxes will be, they are just a taste of what is to come. They will not fix the structural deficit and will hinder the state's recovery at a critical time, ensuring that more taxes will be needed to cover the state's ever-growing budget.

And contrary to O'Malley's claim in his State of the State address, they do not offer a "balanced approach" to fixing the budget. Take the proposed hike in the gas tax, for example, the worst of the bunch. O'Malley's proposal would phase in a 6 percent sales tax on gasoline over three years on top of a combined federal and state tax of 41.9 cents per gallon that already exists.

It will hurt the state's poorest residents much harder than wealthier Marylanders.

As Wendell Cox and Ronald Utt write in a new report (http://www.mdpolicy.org/docLib/20120201_RethinkingMDProposedGasTax.pdf) for the Maryland Public Policy Institute, (where I am a senior fellow) "Specifically, this report estimates that after the proposed tax increase, the lowest-income brackets would pay a share of their incomes more than seven times greater than the share paid by the wealthier households. As a result, the lower-income households likely will choose to decrease their driving to a much greater extent than would higher-income households, an outcome that has important implications for job access at a time when gas prices are also very high."

The gas tax also promises to grow government without mitigating the state's transportation funding problems, because the new money could be transferred to the general fund just as it has been historically to cover the expenses of any number of unrelated programs. Neither will raising the gas tax ease road congestion in one of the worst states for clogged highways, because more than half of the state's transportation dollars go to transit. This makes no sense.

--"Such 'even' funding when highways facilitate 96 percent of the passenger movement and all of the freight movement represents a misallocation of public funding," as Cox and Utt write.

Higher prices will also push the tens of thousands of commuters who travel to D.C. and Virginia each day from Maryland to buy gas out of state, hurting state gas stations, particularly those near the border, and reducing the estimated amount that can be collected by the treasury.

For all these reasons, the gas tax should be tabled. I'll tackle the other taxes in another column.