Tag: Ed DeGrange

Extra tax break for ‘House of Cards’ folds in final hour

Six lawmakers, three from each chamber of the Maryland General Assembly, standing in a ring in the House of Delegates lounge at a half hour before midnight, vehemently haggling over a single bill.

They had only 30 minutes before the close of the 2014 session, and they needed to find middle ground on legislation that would grant the popular Netflix drama an additional $3.5 million in tax dollars.

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No refuge from gambling craze in the heat of a special session

There’s no escaping the gambling craze, whether in the dripping heat of Annapolis in August or the sunny beaches of a cooler Rhode Island.

Last Saturday, barely 15 minutes after setting up my beach chair in Bonnet Shores, R.I., a plane dragging an advertising sign flew over this lovely cove where the Atlantic meets Narragansett Bay. “Vote Yes on 1,” the sign said. “Table Games = R.I. Jobs.”

Even little Rhody is into the latest jobs scheme. If you can’t gin up jobs in manufacturing – say at a decades-old steel mill – expand gambling and create other jobs.

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Teacher pension shift would cost counties $500 million over next four years

In the Senate’s proposed budget plan, some of the costs of teacher retirement would be shifted to county school boards over the next four years, not to the county governments next year, as Gov. Martin O’Malley had proposed. But the approved proposal would ultimately force counties to give their school boards $500 million more over the next four years.

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