Session to look at tax issues

Health care costs, insurance for children also are on the agenda

Congress and the Trump administration will force Maryland’s political leaders to forgo their election-year tradition of limiting controversy when the General Assembly meets this week.

Instead, state lawmakers gathering Wednesday in Annapolis for the 2018 session will wade into the messy business of rewriting Maryland’s tax code and deciding whether any residents should have to pay more in state taxes.

They’ll try to tamp down skyrocketing insurance premiums and debate whether to set aside $110 million for health insurance for children in case Congress does not reauthorize the Children’s Health Insurance Plan.

And they’ll have a partisan fight over the best way to accomplish the widely shared goal of reducing the record homicide rate in Baltimore, where 343 people were killed last year.

All of it will take place against the backdrop of election-year politicking, with lawmakers wary of taking tough votes that could be hard to explain to constituents.

But the issue mostly likely to dominate the annual 90-day marathon of legislating will be whether to return a windfall in state tax revenue prompted by federal tax changes, and if so, how much and to whom.

“It is an economic war,” Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller said of the federal tax law, which inadvertently will pump hundreds of millions of dollars into state coffers next year unless lawmakers change Maryland’s tax code. See ASSEMBLY, page 20