Being right is tiring work.
After years of telling everybody that Maryland’s Democratic budget was a house of cards that would bring painful tax hikes in the immediate future, Moore Administration leaders are starting to admit what the rest of us have known for a while:
State agencies are being asked to tighten their belts as they finalize budget requests for the coming difficult fiscal year.
Emails to every executive branch agency, as well as state universities, told them to prepare fiscal 2028 budget requests that include reductions of roughly 3%, with two dozen Cabinet-level agencies told to prepare budgets with up to 10% reductions.
The memos come as the state heads into a 2027 General Assembly session in January that will be dominated by efforts to eliminate a projected structural budget gap of about $3 billion in the coming fiscal year, with wider gaps predicted in coming years.
“We’re having these conversations and having the tough conversations, and we’re going to continue to,” said State Budget Secretary Yaakov “Jake” Weissmann. “They’re going to have to be genuinely tough decisions that are going to make impacts on how the budget is taken. Hopefully, this sets us on course for the next 20 years if we do this right.”
While that sounds wonderful, we know that the magnitude of the problem is far beyond what Democrats in the General Assembly will be willing to concede, no matter how stark Weissmann’s language is:
Any cuts will have to come from the state’s general fund spending. For context, Weissmann said cutting everything but health, education, public safety and human services spending would not be enough.
“That’s the magnitude of the problem that we’re facing,” he said. “Asking agencies to share what a 10% cut looks like is just a prudent approach to figuring out how we solve this budget shortfall.”
Once again, let me remind you that all of this was entirely predictable:
“The Administration’s budget plan does not appear sustainable”, 1/31/23
The Budget Blues Are Here Again, 8/28/23
Wes Moore’s Plan from Hell, 2/12/24
A Calamity is Coming, 3/13/24
Moore’s Budget Chasm as Wide as it Was Predictable, 11/19/24
1.6 Billion New Problems, 4/8/25
Maryland has 1.4 Billion Problems and Wes Moore is All of Them, 11/12/25
You won’t be surprised to know that Legislative Democrats are already looking at tax hikes during the forthcoming 2027 General Assembly session.
Living in Maryland next year could cost more, as state lawmakers consider raising taxes to address projected budget shortfalls and giving local governments greater power to raise revenue themselves.
This year, Democratic leaders cut services and pushed costs to the local level to keep their promise not to increase fees, a move Republicans alleged was meant to avoid voter backlash ahead of the upcoming November election. But the underlying budget problem remains, leaving lawmakers after the election to consider tax increases, additional cuts or shifting more costs — and potentially more taxing authority — to local governments.
“Everything’s on the table … from different tax increases to different [budget] cuts,” Montgomery County Del. Anne Kaiser, a Democrat and vice chair of the House Appropriations Committee, told The Baltimore Sun of next year’s budget talks.
Sen. Karen Lewis Young, a Frederick County Democrat on the Senate Budget and Taxation Committee, said lawmakers are considering amending Maryland law to allow local governments to introduce or raise taxes without the General Assembly’s approval.
Young is part of a state task force studying how counties and municipalities raise revenue that will make recommendations to the governor by Dec. 1.
The prospect raises questions about how much of the state’s budget burden could ultimately fall on local taxpayers and businesses.
As always, How many times over the last twenty years have people like me have reminded Democrats that you can’t tax people into prosperity? How many times have we said that you cannot continue to mandate increases in state spending without creating an artificial budget cataclysm? How many different ways can we point out that you cannot tie the Governor’s hands year after year after year, reducing discretionary spending every year and requiring maintenance of effort levels, before eventually you run out of money?
Democrats can argue that this year’s budget was always going to be about managing the immediate hole without making things worse. But “we didn’t raise taxes this year” is not a structural fiscal plan. It’s a posture from a party that has stuck its head in the sand concerning Maryland’s spending excesses for over twenty years
Getting back to Weissmann’s comments, he noted that the 10 percent cut agencies have been asked for would reduce the budget by $3 billion and would elimiante the structural deficit. But, as Senate Minority Leader Steve Hershey notes, Democrats would never let it get to that.
“The governor can say, ‘I asked agencies for cuts,’ knowing the General Assembly would rather find another tax or fee than make many of those difficult decisions,” Hershey said. “If he’s serious about 10%, show us the plan, identify the programs that aren’t working, and then fight for those reductions during the legislative session.”
Legislative Democrats have never found a tax they won’t vote for, especially if the alternative is cutting a program that benefits a Democratic special interest group. Therefore, Democrats will make sure that everything is on the table. A 25-percent sales tax increase? A 20 percent income tax hike? Anything is possible to protect Democrats’ pet spending projects.
Democrats are continually screwing Maryland taxpayers. It was the Democrats’ failure to properly manage state spending, including the Democrats’ waste of the Hogan-created Surplus, that has led us to this point. It’s been twenty years of continuous budget increases, mandated spending, pie-in-the-sky pipe-dream programs, and a refusal to recognize the political realities of dependence upon federal largesse. A tax hike is not going to do anything to fix the larger fiscal realities that Democrats refuse to acknowledge.
At some point, there is no more blood to wring from the stone.