Report: O'Malley gas tax hike hits poorest the hardest

The Maryland Public Policy Institute, which has no fondness for taxes generally, does not like Gov.Martin O'Malley's proposed gas-tax increase. Fuel taxes are well-known as regressive, but the institute says a Maryland gas-tax increase of 15 cents (the Sun has estimated it would be 18 cents are current gas prices) would hit the poorest of the poor especially hard. Say Wendell Cox and Ronald Utt:

Exelon building will pull energy from downtown

Granted, the announced move of Constellation Energy/Exelon's new Baltimore headquarters around the Inner Harbor's northeast corner is not a quantum jump. Constellation's present location at 750 E.Pratt St. is already on the edge of downtown, furnishing walk-up patrons for restaurants in Little Italy and other eastern neighborhoods. The new HQ will be less than a mile away.

Md. could get 5th highest gas tax under O'Malley plan

Gov. Martin O'Malley has proposed applying Maryland's 6 percent general sales tax to the price of gasoline, Michael Dresser reports in the paper. Maryland would be the eighth state to put a general sales tax on motor fuels on top of a state excise tax, not to mention the federal excise tax, according to the Tax Foundation.

Shale gas energy of future despite estimate cut

Reports that shale gas may not be as plentiful as people thought are getting lots of attention. Last week the Energy Information Agency sharply cut its estimate of shale gas -- from 827 trillion cubic feet to 482 trillion cubic feet, reports the New York Times. Estimates for the Marcellus Shale in Appalachia cut cut from 410 trillion cubic feet to 141 trillion.

Are Romney-Buffett taxes truly that low? Yes

The Web economics argument of the day is whether Romney's and Warren Buffett's tax rates are really 15 percent or lower. Last night Obama reiterated Warren Buffett's argument that Buffett's tax rate is lower than that of Buffett's secretary. Mitt Romney's tax rate for 2010 was way less than 15 percent, his tax return shows.

Which cliche will Obama say first in SOU speech?

Paddy Power, the Irish bookmaker, is offering odds on President Obama's speech tonight. If you have access to PP's tills, you can bet on which cliché Obama will roll out first, reports Jim Geraghty of the National Review Online.

View: Baltmore can thrive if it cuts taxes like NY, SF, Boston

Of the four cities whose football teams played for league championships yesterday, Baltimore was the only one to steadily lose population through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. Boston, New York and San Francisco all lost thousands of residents in the three decades after World War II, but they began to grow again after 1980, say Steve Hanke, professor of applied economics at Johns Hopkins, and Steve Walters, a fellow at JHU's Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and Study of Business Enterprise. (This WSJ op ed piece is behind a paywall.)

Is this how private equity firms really work?

Sunday's column was about the Bain/Romney/private equity problem writ large -- so large that it's a lot bigger than private equity. Buyout firms are only part of a process that has led to big productivity gains, the column said, whose benefits have accrued mostly to the wealthy: "Not surprisingly, corporate profits as a percentage of revenues are near all-time highs. The middle class is struggling. The top 1 percent of the income gradient has gotten very rich indeed. And many people want to occupy Wall Street."

BWI flights to Sarasota, Huntsville will disappear

More repercussions of the AirTran Southwest merger. Southwest said today it'll end service to six additional AirTran destinations: Allentown, Lexington, Harrisburg, Huntsville, Sarasota and White Plains. That means BWI direct flights to Sarasota and Huntsville will disappear starting in August. I suspected that Sarasota was the more popular destination for Baltimoreans -- snowbirds. But BWI's Web site says there are two daily Huntsville flights and one for Sarasota. Probably a lot of defense-related travel between BWI and Huntsville. But apparently not enough.

O'Malley gets publicity savvy about tax hikes

Lists and rankings are surefire click bait and instant wisdom for Web surfers. The way to gain fame is to make the good lists -- Oscars, Forbes billionaires, best place to live etc.  Membership on bad lists summons notoriety, deserved or not. Worst dressed. 10 Things We Hate. Forbes billionaires!

Gripes continue over BGE Web upgrade

BGE has upgraded its billing and payment software on the Web site. Customers continue to complain about delays in confirming their banking information, about long waits on the customer-service phone lines and now about bills that never got sent out.

Corporate welfare for Bain and Romney

Rugged individualist Mitt Romney is all for the free market, unless it involves pocketing millions in government corporate welfare. Check out the impressive list from Phil Mattera of Good Jobs First of all the companies backed by Bain Capital, Romney's company, that fed at the government udder. In case after case after case, Bain was enjoying public emoluments even as it bought and sold and downsized its way through these employers. 

BGE customers unhappy with website upgrade

Baltimore Gas & Electric has upgraded its website and customer interface software. As often happens in these matters, not all seems to be going smoothly. I've heard from several customers who are having problems with the site. Says one:

Mitt Romney likes to fire people and so should you

Republicans and Democrats are attacking Romney for his remark: "I like being able to fire people who provide services to me." It fits in wtih the idea (I refuse to call it a meme) that Romney is an economic predator, a ruthless levergaed buyout artist who raided companies for cash and laid off the workers. That he may be. 

Olympus exec clawbacks set example for U.S.

This is what you call fulfilling fidicuiary duty to shareholders. Last fall Olympus CEO Michael Woodford exposed a huge accounting scandal at the company, so it fired him. Today Reuters reports that the company "is suing its president and 18 other executives, past and present, for up to $47 million in compensation, as it struggles to recover from one of the nation's worst accounting scandals."

Gingrich attack on Romney an attack on Republicans

So Newt Gingrich is borrowing from the Democrats' oppo-reserach book with his attacks on Mitt Romney's legacy as a leveraged buyout artist. Suddenly leveraged buyouts are "predatory" and "paper shuffling," Gingrich says, according to the NYT. Financed by billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson, Gingrich's Super PAC will flood South Carolina with anti-Romney ads, portraying the former Bain Capital exec as a heartless raider who ruins companies by sucking money out of them. The PAC bought a short documentary, "House of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town" and plans to put it on the Web.

Higher taxes save lives (sometimes)

Greg Mankiw points us to this new paper published through the National Bureau of Economic Research. The 1991 increase in the federal alcohol tax, Philip Cook and Chrisitine Durrance find, is correlated with a decrease traffice deaths, violent crime and property crime. They estimate that the tax increase reduced injury deaths by 7,000 in 1991 alone. 

Another smart Powerball winner takes Hancock's advice

From the Maryland Lottery: "An excited Pennsylvania couple arrived at Lottery Headquarters today, accompanied by legal counsel, to claim their $128.8 million Powerball prize. The elated twosome, who chose to remain anonymous, had the only winning ticket for the Christmas Eve drawing. The couple’s Quick Pick Powerball numbers of 14, 16, 30, 51, 52 and Power Ball 19, matched all five white balls and the red Power Ball to win the second-largest jackpot ever hit in Maryland."

The darker side of the jobs report

Of course the addition of 200,000 jobs in December and a slight decline in unemployment are good news. But the economy has a long, long way to go. There are still 13 million unemployed. Millions more want to work but have stopped looking, which, according to the Labor Department, doesn't make them count among the jobless. Hundreds of thousands more are working part time and would like to work full time. Many who work full time make poverty wages.

Wien 'surprises' include stock rally, unemployment drop, hacker attack

Byron Wien has been publishing a New Year's list of possible economic and political "surprises" for years, often with impressive results. The idea is to identify events that are likely to happen but that the market believes have a low probability of occurring -- and that are therefore mispriced. Since the consensus outlook for 2012 is pretty miserable, most of his surprises are positive. 

The story one homeless man -- and 4,000 more

Check out Mark Reutter's great profile of Linwood Hearne, who sleeps on the street with is wife in front vestibule of Health Care for the Homeless. Here's Reutter on Baltimore Brew:

Here's one way to make money on pay phones

Apparently pay-phone owners make money when certain toll-free numbers are called. So this guy programmed his phones to repeatedly call the numbers. Similar to robo-clicking on blog sites, only a little more direct. And more lucrative. Pay phones are a dying business, but Mr. Kantartzis seems to have found a way to revive them. Temporarily.