Commentary - Gov. O’Malley can’t see forest for treats

Forrest Gump once told moviegoers: “Stupid is as stupid does.” Gump should have been a political pundit. It took him just five short words and seven syllables to tell us all we need to know about the new leadership in Annapolis. It takes a lot for me to bust on our affable new governor and call him ‘stupid.’

Though he and I don’t see eye to eye on politics, we both love Baltimore, and I’ve seen him in concert more than I’ve seen most bands. So, if he actually did his job, pushed through slots, cut the budget and didn’t try to wreck the economy, I would gladly cut him some slack.

Instead, slots languish, the budget is enormous and now he’s trying to go for the trifecta. (My apologies to race fans for that bit of irony. O’Malley could well be captaining our ship of state when horse racing finally sinks beyond rescue. So using race terms to describe him is a bit ridiculous.)

You see, O’Malley isn’t satisfied that congressional Democrats are likely to get an increase in the minimum wage to $7.25. According to The Associated Press, O’Malley wants lawmakers to look at “a living wage, so that people who work hard are able to bring home a decent living for their families when they play by the rules.”

What exactly is a “decent living”? Apparently, the unions that threw money at O’Malley’s campaign want companies doing business with the state to pay close to $12 an hour. That’s almost $25,000 a year in a time of fiscal crisis. This is like the minimum wage on steroids. It doesn’t matter how much government demands you be paid; the marketplace sets how much you are worth.

If government demands that janitors be paid like CEOs, then no one will hire janitors. If the state (maybe I should uppercase that, just like the old Soviet Union) decides you have to pay entry-level workers $12 an hour, then you will either hire few or pass the bill down to everybody else — causing inflation.

O’Malley just won one election, and he’s already pandering to the public to win the next one.

“Run, Martin. Run.”

Maybe the governor will drop the Irish music, buy a shrimp boat and get some Cajun tunes for his new form of Gump-tion.

It’s as if he had forgotten all about last year’s fiasco that tried to make Wal-Mart pay extra health care benefits. Maybe O’Malley and the legislative leadership are sitting in one of Maryland’s last allowed smoke-filled rooms trying to find ways to chase business away. I guess the deficit isn’t high enough already.

Forrest Gump wasn’t right about everything. He also told us: “Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get.” In the case of Gov. O’Malley, apparently Gump was wrong. I thought we would get crazy, left-wing idealism that could cripple the state economy.

I was right.

Dan Gainor is a career journalist, media commentator and The Boone Pickens Free Market Fellow at the Media Research Center’s Free Market Project. He can be reached at gainorcolumn@gmail.com.