Maryland Raises Taxes; EJ Swoons

Careful readers of our little blog may detect a slight anti-tax bias. We have been keeping our eye on the $1.4 billion confiscation from the good people of Maryland being perpetrated upon them by Gov O'Malley and a pliant legislature. As citizens of the Old Dominion, we are concerned about the flood of refugees from from Maryland that this takings will likely prompt. (Although we can always make space for more tax refugees, I suppose.) So we were amused (but not surprised) to read EJ Dionne's love letter to the Gov in which he waxes poetic about the righteousness of higher taxes:

Nonetheless, the sound you are hearing not only in Maryland but in state capitals across the nation is the crashing and crumbling of ideology, specifically a right-wing ideology that demonizes taxes and government while preaching that the public interest depends upon solicitude toward the comfortable and the privileged.

It is not that EJ disagrees with the conservative view; that would be no fun. Instead he is a feather-quill warrior, standing strong for the defenseless government, raging against the hated right-wingers who demonize taxes, preventing those nasty conservatives from plundering the treasury and distributing the booty to the Halliburton board of directors.

But EJ is not alone in his happy quest, he has a band of merry governors working hard to find new taxes to raise:

Those rebelling against this dying disposition include not only liberals such as O'Malley, but also moderates such as Govs. Janet Napolitano of Arizona and Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, both Democrats, and Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger of California.

Golly, where would we be without such rebels? Folks who boldly agree to take on, then solve the world's problems by redistributing money from you to them. Excelsior!