This morning, the Tax Foundation went to the Maryland State House in Annapolis to announce that the “Free State” made the biggest one-year decline in our annual ranking of the “business-friendliness” of each states’ tax systems: from 24th in 2008 to 45th in 2009. Why? Maryland’s drop is attributable to an increase in most of the state’s major taxes for FY 2009: the corporate income tax, sales tax, cigarette excise tax, and personal income tax rate, which is now worst personal income tax in the country, with a significantly lower score than second-place California. While we were competing with Gov. O’Malley’s meeting with the Board of Public Works over his final proposed budget cuts, and a protest from a group that wanted no more cuts to the Developmental Disabilities Administration, we still got in several interviews with local press. But we wanted to give a shout out to our friends in the “series of tubes”: P. Kenneth Burns of Maryland Politics Today gives us a mention while blaming Gov. O’Malley for “not slowing the rate of government growth sooner.” Burns also mentions our State-Local Tax Burdens report in PolitickerMD.com, calling on Maryland to improve its financial health by being “friendlier to business and to its citizens in general.” O’MalleyWatch.com says our Index “deserves a read” and points out that if we included DC, Maryland would actually have a worse business tax climate than its non-state neighbor. Now that we have the bad news out of the way (New Jersey and Maryland), look for “good-news” stories from the Index soon.
