Socialist One Party Rule in the state of Maryland had gotten so extreme that the state actually imposed a tax on rain, that had to be paid by state employers and property owners.
The Democrat Party of today is no longer the party of John F. Kennedy, Harry Truman, and Franklin Roosevelt. These folks were foolhardy liberals no doubt. But they were still willing to stand up and fight for America, and its long time capitalist prosperity.
They went toe to toe with the Communists in Cuba, Berlin, and Viet Nam. They went up to the edge, but they maintained America’s military superiority to contain the Communists in Russia, China, North Korea and Vietnam. And they considered it their sacred duty to maintain the economic growth and prosperity that fueled the good life of America’s middle class, as well as America’s world dominant “arsenal of democracy.”
Indeed, those original American Democrats led a world war against the socialist cousins of the Communists, fighting, and defeating, the Fascists (National Socialists) of Germany and Italy, led by Hitler and Mussolini. Moreover, those original American Democrats were standard bearers for blue collar working people, and their high paying manufacturing jobs.
Maryland in those days represented America’s blue collar “arsenal of democracy.” In 1950, Baltimore was the sixth largest city in the country, home to nearly 1 million residents. In 1971, the Bethlehem steel mill at Sparrows Point just outside of Baltimore was the largest in the entire country, employing 55,000 hard-working blue collar Americans.
That steel mill fed the General Motors Automobile Plant on Broening Highway, the Maryland Shipyard and Drydock, Bendix Corporation, and Martin Marietta, which for decades built the Army’s tanks, the Navy’s ships, and the Air Force’s planes. Those companies led a complex of manufacturing throughout the Baltimore metro area.
But today’s Democrat Party of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders is very different. The whole point of the 20th Century was that socialism and communism do not work. The rest of the world has learned that. But not the Rip Van Winkle, hippie socialist, Democrat Party of Obama, Clinton and Sanders.
Today’s Democrats have more cool friends than the blue collar working families of the 1950s. Their friends are the environmental extremists that want to reverse the industrial revolution in the name of the deceitful fantasies of climate change and global warming. Their priority is no longer the religious freedom of the Catholic community that founded Maryland, but the social experiments of their new friends in the “LGBT community.”
The top priority of these Democrats is not economic growth and prosperity for America’s middle class, but the socialist equality of Che Guevara and his Cuban Communist revolutionaries. As Churchill perceptively explained, the inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. But the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of misery.
Today’s new left Democrats are led in Maryland by Chris Van Hollen, Donna Edwards and Martin O’Malley. Under their careless misleadership, Baltimore is in long term decline from the industrial powerhouse leading the way to victory in World War II, to its current state of post-industrial poverty. Its population is down by a third to 600,000, behind Memphis and El Paso, and on its way to the bankruptcy of Detroit.
It was these idiots who imposed the rain tax on the surviving small businesses, working people and homeowners of Maryland. But they are joined today by Republican handmaiden, House Minority Whip Kathy Szeliga, who is running for U.S. Senate now on the false claim that she led the repeal of the Democrats’ rain tax.
Under that “repeal,” counties must still raise the same taxes to scrub clean the natural rainfall in Maryland, which is not pollution. She delivered the still woeful Republican House minority to the Democrats’ scam plan to just eliminate the requirement that they call it the “rain tax.” But there is still no answer to Republican delegate Richard Impallaria asking “How do I go back to my constituents in Baltimore County and tell them employers are still going to have to pay every year a two thousand, three thousand…five hundred thousand rain tax bill?”
The only candidate in that Senate race with an answer for the working people of Maryland is Republican Dave Wallace of Carroll County.
Peter Ferrara is Senior Fellow for Entitlement Reform and Budget Policy for the Heartland Institute, and Senior Policy Advisor to the National Tax Limitation Foundation. He served in the White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, and as Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under President George H.W. Bush.