Martin O'Malley delivers the 2011 State of the State address. (Photo: Associated Press)

Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley delivered his State of the State address on Thursday, and to those familiar with the rhetorical stylings of the Old Line State’s head honcho, not much was new. We’re in the toughest of times! Maryland is well-positioned for the new economy because of innovation and education! Moving forward!

O’Malley did drop one nugget we’d never heard him use before: “Together, we’ve reduced the size of state government — already the 8th smallest government among the 50 states.”

Is Maryland, a traditional stronghold for Democrats, a paragon of small government?

In this helpfully footnoted version of the speech, O’Malley attributes the small government statistic to a report from RBC Capital Markets titled “US Municipal FOCUS: State and local Government employment – How Significant?” The report shows that Maryland's state and local government workforces, when combined, are the eighth smallest in the republic.

But it's questionable whether the size of the state's workforce is the best way to measure the size of state government. You could also look at the state budget or at state government's share of gross domestic product. In 2008, state and local governments in Maryland made up 8.5 percent of the state's GDP, according to data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. By that measure, Maryland's government is the 16th smallest in the nation.

But both the BEA data and the data cited by O'Malley suffer from two fatal words: "and local." O'Malley mentioned only state government in his speech. But the fact that the report he cites doesn’t back up his statement doesn’t necessarily make the governor wrong.

It is true that since taking office in 2007, O'Malley has cut the size of the state workforce, although many of the positions he eliminated were vacant. More recently, he offered buyouts to veteran state employees, and almost 1,400 employees were willing to take him up on his offer.

The RBC Capital Markets report didn’t break out state employment separately, so we looked for other government statistics. The U.S. Census Bureau has state government employment totals current as of March 2009, and we compared those with Bureau of Labor Statistics total employment numbers from the same time frame.

Under this measurement, about 3.7 percent of Maryland's workforce is employed by the state government. Nationally, that's the 13th smallest share, not the 8th.

If O’Malley was speaking off the cuff, he could be forgiven for slipping up on the difference between “state” and “state and local.” But when he’s giving the biggest speech of the General Assembly session, there’s no such wiggle room. Even though, relatively speaking, Maryland’s state government has fewer employees than a lot of states, O’Malley still earns a Total Malarkey.