After the 2014 Legislative Session: More Work to Do

While the General Assembly should be commended for taking several steps to improve the lives of working Marylanders and their families, it also  enacted some potentially harmful policies and left a pile of unfinished business that should be  on the agenda for the 2015 session.

Though lawmakers helped strengthen working families by boosting the state’s minimum wage and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, they failed to take another crucial step:  requiring employers to provide earned sick leave. Allowing employees to take time off to tend to health matters would improve public health and benefit Maryland’s economy, and should be a priority in the 2015 legislative session.

Lawmakers also failed to pass other smart policies that would have made the state’s government more efficient, saved taxpayer dollars, and benefited Marylanders. This includes legislation  that would automatically enroll individuals in Medicaid if they are eligible  for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance  Program (SNAP) or  if their children are eligible for Medicaid,  which would have expanded health coverage while reducing bureaucracy. The General Assembly also failed to  act on the Healthy Maryland Initiative, which would raise money to expand access to health care through a $1 increase in the cigarette tax. Advocates are already hard at work to enact this legislation in the 2015 legislative session, and lawmakers should adopt this approach that has proven to be effective in the past.

Another piece of unfinished business is  the Law Enforcement Trust Act, which would have curbed the lengthy state and local detention of suspected unauthorized immigrants who committed traffic violations and other minor infractions, helping to restore trust between immigrant communities and law enforcement and saving valuable local law enforcement resources. Governor O’Malley recently ended the practice of honoring ICE detainers at the state-run Baltimore Detention Center, but lawmakers should do the same for the numerous local detention centers across Maryland. 

The 2015 legislative session is also an opportunity for lawmakers to enact a corporate accounting change, known as combined reporting, that will close a loophole that allows large, multistate corporations to avoid paying their fare share in state taxes.

On the other side of the ledger, lawmakers  took several  steps in the wrong direction that ought to be reversed next session. The most egregious was a law to cut the estate tax for millionaires. Doing so deprives the state of revenue  when we can least afford it. Cutting the estate tax also increases income inequality at a time when inherited wealth is on the rise.  In an especially galling twist, the legislation  would eventually allow  the level of wealth that is exempt from taxation to rise with inflation. Lawmakers did so even as they refused to allow the minimum wage to rise with inflation This should alarm anyone concerned about the outsized influence of the wealthy on lawmakers and policy.

Lawmakers also need to revisit several other shortcomings in the minimum wage increase, including a freeze on the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers and the creation of a “training wage” loophole that will allow employers to pay workers under age 20 less than the minimum wage.

While state lawmakers should be proud of the important accomplishments from this year’s session, there is still more work to do to foster broad prosperity in Maryland. Check back here as we provide research, analysis, and commentary on these issues. The 2014 session may be over, but the task of making Maryland’s economy and government work for all residents continues.

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Note: As Maryland's state government is preparing to start a new chapter following the close of the 2014 Legislative Session and this year's elections, so too is the Maryland Center on Economic Policy. This will be our last post at this address as we prepare to launch our new web site at www.mdeconomy.org, which will also host a new and improved version of Maryland's Money Matters. So be on the lookout for an announcement about this exciting development in the coming days.