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This will certainly draw the obligatory ad hominem attacks from left wing Koolaid aficionados but if you pay attention you’ll see that even using the flawed assumptions of the global warming zealots, O’Malley’s PlanMaryland (a.k.a. Plan Fairyland) is a fraud. It’s a power grab masquerading as environmental policy. The math just doesn’t work.

Here’s Governor Owe’Malley’s snow job introduction to PlanMaryland.

More:
Forum led by Carroll County debates state’s PlanMaryland proposal: Rothschild says plan essentially ‘theft of property rights’
O’Malley’s Smart Growth power grab
Md. rural officials, lawmakers threaten tax revolt, mass exodus over environmental plan

By now everyone has seen and commented on Nina Totenberg’s vacuous “…excuse the expression…a Christmas party..” line, but in the the understandable reaction to Totenberg’s blind adherence to political correctness we have missed the truly inane part of her statement.

Before her silly comment on Christmas, Totenberg says this:

I want to say one thing about the budget that didn’t get passed, the omnibus bill. You know, we talk a lot about – we just passed this huge tax cut in part because business said, you know, we have to plan, we have to know what kind of tax cuts we have. Well, these agencies, including the Defense Department, don’t know how much money they’ve got and for what.

Only someone with little or no practical knowledge (a journalist for example) could make such a comparison. Someone should let Nina know that government agencies do not do zero-based budgeting. They know that they will get at least what they spent last year plus a sizable increase.

I have no doubt that some bureaucrats at the…ahem…Christmas party she attended were whining about the terrible inconvenience of of having to plan how to make do with only a little more than last year. However, to compare that to businesses who have to earn the money they spend is ludicrous. Businesses have to create real budgets from the ground up. They are not guaranteed a minimum level of “income” like Washington bureaucracies are.

If you were offended by her aside about Christmas, take a step back and look at the content of the argument she was making at the time. What offends me is that someone with no real insight is on television carrying water for the poor downtrodden paper shufflers in Washington, and that the overpaid paper shufflers are complaining about uncertainty because they don’t know how much more they’ll get this year.