Letter to the Editor The role of money in political campaigns January 24 Regarding the Jan. 18 editorial “A less-than-super fix,” on Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s statement that candidates should be allowed to collect unlimited donations: Mr. Romney is right on this issue. The 1974 campaign finance legislation was a cure […]
November 2011 Another Distant Warning Earlier this year, we drew attention to an impending treasury raid sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union in the form of a study proposing a massive building program for the Baltimore City public schools, to be carried out through the use of >funny financing= in the form […]
Confronting Party Myths by George W. Liebmann Some cheer can be obtained from recent fiscal events. The Reagan-Bush tax cuts ended the Democratic era of tax and spend. The debt limit crisis ended the Republican era of borrow and spend. Perhaps the hour of the late Adlai Stevenson, who told us “there are no gains […]
NOW AVAILABLE MARION ELIZABETH RODGERS’ BALTIMORE BAR LIBRARY TALK ON “MENCKEN, RITCHIE AND PROHIBITION” AS PART OF PROHIBITION IN MARYLAND: A COLLECTION OF DOCUMENTS including speeches and messages by Governor Albert Ritchie, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and members of Maryland’s prohibition-era congressional delegation, excerpts from the Wickersham report on the prohibition laws, and texts of […]
Maryland is known as a strong union state, and it would seem improbable to Marylanders that the current battle in Wisconsin could be replicated here. Maryland’s budget deficit is less pronounced than that of Wisconsin, though its combined state debt and pension deficits place it among the top 20 states in debt burden. It retains […]
The current state administration likes to boast of its economic development record, but the best test of economic development is provided by the way that people behave in fact. For many years, Maryland was one of the fastest-growing states in the East. Its growth was spurred not only by the growth of the national government […]
Fresh from its advocacy of the Thornton Plan, which exploded current expense spending for schools in the name of a supposed constitutional imperative, the A.C.L.U. now seeks to duplicate this experience with school capital spending. It will be recalled that the A.C.L.U. brought a lawsuit, Bradford v. Board of Education, asserting that the education clause […]
George Liebmann talked about his November 22, 2010 article in the Baltimore Sun, The Youth Employment Conundrum, that suggests policy changes to create jobs for young people may be needed to avoid social unrest. http://www.c-span.org/Watch/Media/2010/11/26/WJE/A/41208/George+Liebmann+Calvert+Institute+for+Policy+Research.aspx
There are many resemblances between former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. and Gov. Martin O’Malley, but this election is not a choice between tweedledum and tweedledee. Mr. Ehrlich has compromised himself in conventional ways, most notably by signing an unaffordable Democrat-sponsored election-year increase in teachers’ pensions on which he should have bestowed a foredoomed veto. […]
In March 2006, the Institute issued a Report, The Baltimore City Retirement Systems: Heading for Trouble. The summary at the front of the Report stated: “The skimming off of surpluses to provide new unfunded benefits in good investment years, together with mediocre or worse investment performance and an escalation of disability claims in the Fire […]