Commentary

The Baltimore City Council recently demanded that Police Commissioner Michael Harrison present a hasty plan detailing how the police will make the city safer. The commissioner complied in short order and told the council there would be, in essence, a larger police presence. Everyone is very upset by the violent crime gripping the city; way too many of these acts of violence involve the use of a handgun by people who are not permitted to possess a gun.

Offshore wind power is coming here! Maryland’s Clean Energy Jobs Act of 2019 (CEJA) mandates the procurement of at least 1,200 megawatts of in-state offshore wind by 2030. Because offshore wind is one of the most expensive forms of renewable energy, this requirement will increase the electric bills of Maryland’s residential and small-business electricity consumers (large consumers are exempt).

At one point in Al Gore’s seminal 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth,” the former vice president laments that his tobacco-farming parents didn’t stop raising tobacco until after their beloved daughter Nancy died of lung cancer in Tennessee. “It’s just human nature to take time to connect the dots,” Mr. Gore says in the film. “But … there can be a day of reckoning when you wish you had connected the dots more quickly.”

Five sentences sum up the war in Ukraine as it stands now. The Russians are running out of precision-guided weapons. The Ukrainians are running out of Soviet-era munitions. The world is running out of patience for the war. The Biden administration is running out of ideas for how to wage it. And the Chinese are watching.

Small business owners in Maryland and across the country are reporting inflation and supply chain disruptions are impacting their businesses in big ways. Small businesses play an important role in our national economy, with small businesses making up more than 99% of all of Maryland businesses, and nearly half of all of Maryland’s employees being employed at one, according to the U.S. Small Business Association. According to new research from Bank of America, small business owners are facing market-driven and operational challenges, like inflation, supply chain issues and labor shortages.

There the two words every high school student — especially those in a senior class — long to hear: graduation day. In each of the last two years, that has meant something a little different. Members of the Class of 2020, who graduated at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, had a collective virtual ceremony but received their diplomas in one of the most unusual ways possible as they drove to their schools and stood individually with their school principal on small stages or sidewalks to be handed the crowning achievement of their scholastic careers.

Big money rules in Congress. Gun manufacturers can always prevent common-sense legislation like improved background checks, even though more than 90% of all voters and 83% of gun owners favor the measure. Similarly, we pay more for prescription drugs because our government officials — beholden as they are to corporate campaign spenders — will not allow our government to negotiate prices via Medicare and Medicaid. The same makers sell the same drugs in other nations for a small fraction of the price they charge in the U.S.A.