In a utopian world, there is plenty of money for everybody’s priorities. All public services can be funded, we can spend unlimited resources on education, and everything will be rainbows and ponies.
That’s not the real world, but it appears to be the world the Kirwan Commission lives in.
The funding workgroup of the Kirwan Commission released its funding recommendations today. They are clearly not based on any fiscal realities.
We’ve spoken ad nauseum about the state-level funding requirements. We’ve already noted that the working group stacked with tax-and-spend Democrats beholden to the Maryland State Education Association was already planting a budget bomb that would require a 10% increase in state spending and over $6,000 a year in new state taxes. But not being content with increasing state taxes, the working group has decided that county-level taxes aren’t high enough either based on the county-level funding requirements under the Kirwan recommendations. <more>