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The Breakdown of Montgomery[*] County.

By: Moe Lane (Diary)  |  June 1st, 2010 at 08:35 AM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

The Washington Post can be amusing, sometimes.  In this article (via Instapundit) they provide a comparison of two counties – Montgomery County in Maryland, and Fairfax County in Virginia – to the former’s distinct disadvantage.  The short version: Montgomery County is stuck with an elected Democratic leadership that is beholden to public sector unions*, spends in a fashion that insults drunken sailors, and… actually, those two statements sum it up neatly.  Although Montgomery County having a maxed-out local income tax can’t be helping, either.  The end result: with comparable budgets and populations, Montgomery County had to reconcile an almost 1 billion dollar budget deficit and is facing worse, while Fairfax County had to work out deficits one quarter that and is pretty much no worse off than most of the rest of the country. 

With regard to handling the problems of the former, the WaPo offers three suggestions:

– Candidates for council and school board in Montgomery should foreswear all donations to or from public employees unions. This is a minimum necessary step to sever the cozy ties that have indebted officeholders to the employees they are supposed to oversee and whose compensation forms a critical aspect of the county’s fiscal integrity.

– Candidates for public office, who are routinely asked to fill out questionnaires from public employees unions and other special interests in election years, should refuse to answer any question that would commit them to undefined future spending.

– The county should beef up its rainy-day reserve funds as a means to protect against future downturns, provide an incentive to fiscal restraint and safeguard the county’s shaky AAA bond rating.

Which is… nice, but since there’s not a chance in Perdition that any Democrat in Maryland is going to credibly run on a platform like this this year (their party leadership cadre does not boast the sharpest knives in the drawer**), I would like to offer an alternative suggestion:

– Vote for the Republican.

Radical idea, yes – but these are radical times, no?

Moe Lane

*The WaPo actually absolves the public sector unions of any wrongdoing in any of this.  I don’t know if that’s utter fear, or utter paternalistic contempt.

**”The Republican questioned why O’Malley’s campaign would run the ad when the state Democratic Party is contending that program sponsors are in effect subsidizing Ehrlich’s campaign.”  Because it’s O’Malley?  As I said: not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

I’m still deciding which candidate to endorse in the GOP MD-GOV primary (I live in Maryland, so I need to have an opinion), so until then here’s the Maryland GOP site.

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

[*]Oops.  Fixed.

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COMMENTS

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  • bk

    The public employee unions need to gain more power in Fairfax County to equalize things.

  • Tanggor

    I lived in Germantown, Montgomery County MD for 18 years.

    In 2004 I moved to Loudoun County Virginia.

    Best move I ever made.

    Good luck with that Moe.

    At least you know you’re behind enemy lines.

  • jackbenimble

    In that general area, Prince William County has been the toughest on illegal immigrants with its 287g program. But Fairfax County uses the Secure Communities Program. In contrast, Montgomery County and most of Maryland are illegal immigration sanctuaries. There has been a considerable exodus from Northern Virginia of illegal aliens to Maryland as evidenced by the numbers of ESL kids in schools and falling crime rates in Virginia. Do you suppose having to pick up the tab for all these poor people who don’nt pay taxes has anything to do with this story?

  • fairbanks

    Anyone who’s ever visited the area knows that every part of Virginia is better than any part of Maryland, particularly Montgomery County, the allegedly “nicest” part of the state. As much as I love a big plate of hard shells, Virginia is just better run, hands down. Northern Virginia is as ideal as urban settings go, while the western parts of the state provide America with bacon and power plant coal. Not to mention the Hampton Roads shipyards, which have supplied much of the Atlantic fleet for almost 300 years. Better schools, affordable colleges, low taxes.

  • The_Gadfly

    has even more to do with it. I’ve lived in the People’s Republic of MD for some 20 years now always as a renter. A couple of years back my roommate decided to buy a house and I moved with her. She bought in Germantown, technically part of the Montgomery County taxing area. The area has the highest allowed income and property taxes. As a result of this combined with their desire to not tax retired grandmothers out of their houses they passed an amusing bit of protection against tax increases: if you have lived in your house for more than 6 months as of December of the previous tax year, taxes on your current house cannot increase more than 10% as a result of an increase in the valuation of your property. With assurances from the seller, seller’s agent and her own agent that current taxes would be the rates paid, my roommate settled in June and we moved in July. So she figured she was covered by that clause.* Unfortunately, the paperwork wasn’t filed until August for some reason so she was hit with full tax rate based on the price she paid for the house which translated into a large increase in the amount due in taxes because the sale price of the house was about 33% over the valuation for taxes. If the clause had been in effect, she expected to be facing a 10% increase in taxes paid almost indefinitely. So much like federal income taxes before Reagan, the local politicians pretty much had a guaranteed 10%/year increase in tax money built into their budgets. Except the real estate market, even here in DC, crashed.

    Now that crashing here in DC, isn’t like the crashing in say California. Houses are moving more slowly but still selling, and most people aren’t losing their lives savings, but the house I live in is back down to the valuation it had back a few years ago when my roommate bought it. That does mean no additional taxes for politcos. If they were getting that additional income, they’d be trimming instead of being in full panic mode.

    ###

    * I read the law she said granted the coverage and thought the agents were full of crap. The way it was written I think you get hit with the full valuation because it resets at the time of the sale, not at the end of the year. But far better schooled people I know disagree.

  • The_Gadfly

    in the People’s Republic of MD for more than 20 years now, and know that for as bad as it is here, just a few miles from me it is several times worse.

  • mbecker908

    agents are required to carry E&O insurance and your roomie might have redress against one or both of the agents for the increase in taxes.

  • jaydickb

    for 40 years, 31 of which was in Montgomery County. I have since retired and moved to central VA. Taxes was one of the reasons I left.

    Way back, taxes were about the same in the two states. MD steadily increased all kinds of taxes and provided absolutely no value for the increases. VA kept most taxes steady and actually reduced or eliminated a few.

    Anyone moving to the DC area who chooses to live in MD or DC is ignorant, stupid, liberal, or all of the above. Wait, there is some redundancy in that list.

  • Richard Mullins

    and I don’t even want to move there. I’d have to on Crack to Move there. I love Harris County,TX and Montgomery County,TX isn’t bad. Montgomery County,MD and HI are the most insane places that I’ve ever lived.

  • The_Gadfly

    It was an expensive life lesson, but since she budgeted to be able to pay for the house on just her salary, my rent payments cushioned the blow. As do the tax write-offs she gets on home improvements since I rent from her.

  • ktrs

    Both MD & DC have 10% caps on annual property tax increases, VA doesn’t except maybe for seniors. But this should never be carried from one owner to the next- what if someone bought a house 30 years ago for $45,000 and its worth $400,000 today? It should always reset when a purchase occurs, however the assessment will still be based on a market assessment, not purchase price, and local gov’t market assessments are intentionally conservative. DC often lets the 2nd owner keep the tax base of the prior owner, its a reason why they’re so in the hole, their system has no failsafes and checks. MD phases in the new assessment over 3 years. So if the current assessment is $300,000 and the new assessment is $450,000 then the in year 1 the actual assessment that the tax is based on will be $350K, in year 2 it will be $400K and in year 3 it will be $450K. In VA the assessment is every year, full value market assessment. In general property taxes are lower in MD, higher in VA, income taxes are higher in MD, lower in VA.