State Budget Issues with Honorable Richard Madaleno

By Wendy Wolff, Senior Consultant, Maryland Nonprofits

*Photo caption: Honorable Richard Madaleno (right) with participant Liz Powell, G2G Consulting, at the 2015 Legislative Preview.

 

Imagine having to reduce your family budget by 2-3 percent. It would require analyzing overall spending and identifying the categories that could take simple reductions. The close examination would reveal modest adjustments like decreased spending at Starbucks, a few less trips to the hair salon, and other easy strategies to make the slight savings. Our families might even dine out less and spend one weekend a month without driving the family car. With a median household income of $73,538 as reported by The U.S. Census Bureau, one Maryland family would cut approximately $2200 from their yearly budget which equates to about $42 per week. This can be done without an excruciating amount of chaos and pain.

In his presentation about State Budget Issues in Maryland, the Honorable Richard Madaleno described the lingering budget deficit to be addressed by the incoming Administration. This $760M deficit seems enormous and sounds insurmountable to the average citizen. With media input and additional political inflammation, the current budget deficit appears of devastating proportion. Yet, it is not. Delegate Madaleno shared with the audience that in fact, $760M is merely 2-3% of the total budget, which in our family model was easy to reduce.

Terms like crisis and structural deficit are currently being used to implement even further budget cuts, but in fact Maryland doesn’t face an actual crisis. We simply have a 2-3% lingering deficit to correct in our annual spending. Four items in the Maryland budget are the most likely targets for the needed reduction:  K-12, Higher Education, Healthcare and Prison. His projection was that the budget cuts will probably come from either K-12 spending or Higher Education for a variety of political reasons held by the incoming Administration.

 

Read our previous blogs in this series:
Nonprofit Advocates Gear Up for 2015 Legislative Session>>
State Budget Update>>

 

Join us for the Quality of Life Summit March 24th at the McDonogh School in Owings Mills, MD. 

 

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