LOGIN NOT A MEMBER? REGISTER

FOR PRESS CONTACT US  SUPPORT

The Maryland Public Policy Institute

• RESEARCH
• Criminal Justice
• Economic & Fiscal Policy
• Education
• Environment
• Gambling
• Gas Tax/Infrastructure
• Government Transparency
• Health Care
• Property Taxes
• Public Pensions
• Taxes
• Transportation
• Welfare
• EXPERTS
• EVENTS
• MPPI PRESS
• ABOUT US
• POLICY BLOG
• MARYLAND JOURNAL

O'Malley's Record

Originally Published in the Frederick News-Post

Government Transparency

by Marta Hummel Mossburg

OP-EDS

It turns out there were a lot of truths that weren't very true in Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth." But it has not stopped him from becoming a celebrity icon of environmentalists, fawned upon by believers around the world who pay him to speak about science he can't defend.

In the same way, Gov. Martin O'Malley has risen from mayor of Baltimore to governor of Maryland to head of the Democratic Governors Association based on a record that only acolytes of progressivism could defend.

He needs to be called out as he jets from national talk show to talk show proclaiming the gospel of government spending to help President Barack Obama retain his job -- and set himself up to run for the highest office in 2016.

Let's focus on his record on jobs, as creating them is O'Malley's main goal. When then-Mayor O'Malley was running for governor in 2006, he said he created thousands of jobs in Baltimore during his tenure. Statistics showed the city lost thousands of jobs while he was in office. When asked about the discrepancy, he explained that he did not mean net new jobs, just jobs.

That should have alerted voters to the fact that he cared more about the appearance of jobs than actual ones that come with a paycheck. But voters didn't seem to care. He beat Republican incumbent Robert Ehrlich by a 6 percent margin in 2006 and then beat him again in 2010 by a 15 percent margin. Call it failing upward.

Fast forward to 2012. Maryland lost 6,000 jobs in April, according to the most recent labor statistics, and needs to create almost 150,000 jobs to bring employment back up to pre-recession levels. At the same time, income inequality has expanded under O'Malley and a record 700,000 people receive food assistance.

Thanks to the federal government, Maryland's 6.7 percent unemployment rate is lower than the national average of 8.1 percent. But the most he can say is that he presided over Baltimore's decline, saw thousands leave the state through outmigration while governor, and was lucky to receive billions in federal stimulus dollars so that he didn't have to make hard choices about state spending.

Even if he can be credited with bringing federal dollars to Maryland, that means they were taken away from someplace else to bring wealth to a few people in this state -- a tactic for which he constantly criticizes presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.

As he said on "Meet the Press" Sunday, Romney's job at Bain Capital "was to return profits as quickly as possible to a very narrow few rather than to create long-term jobs for the many."

So far, the only things that O'Malley has shown he is good at are raising state spending -- from $29.6 billion a year to $35.9 billion in the six years since he took office -- and hiking taxes.

That strategy is making Maryland less competitive and its residents more financially stratified. If that is the kind of country Americans want, they can find their man in Annapolis.