Maryland’s largest newspaper is turning on lefty lawmakers at the state capital for being largely responsible for creating the economic crisis the Old Line State faces today.
The Baltimore Sun Editorial Board lambasted Maryland Democrats in an October 21 editorial headlined, “Maryland must make itself open for business.” The newspaper’s top brass noted that “Maryland’s political leaders have largely blamed President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s federal cost-slashing for the state’s economic challenges. But the warning lights started flashing before the current federal administration.”
The editorial doesn't name Gov. Wes Moore, who has been touted as a potential Democrat presidential contender. Much of the ongoing turmoil in the state, the editorial board wrote, is a direct result of “business-hostile policies.” Beyond this, the General Assembly “doubled down on steep fee hikes, including vehicle registration increases so burdensome that residents can opt for payment plans.”
“Leaders can no longer ignore how undisciplined fiscal policy contributes to our plight,” the newspaper rebuked. Wow. Talk about pulling the rug from underneath the radical progressives in Annapolis.
The editorial board then put the left-wing Maryland lawmakers, who control the trifecta of government leadership, on full blast:
[M]uch of Maryland’s economic woes stem from state-level decisions, not just federal forces. The General Assembly this year approved over $1.6 billion in new taxes and fees — many explicitly targeting job creators and employment hubs, including the revived ‘millionaire tax’ and the controversial “IT tax.
According to the newspaper, these insane levels of taxes are a mop-up job to clean up the $3 billion deficit mess left by the state’s outrageous levels of spending. That deficit, the editorial board noted, “came about in large part because of ill-advised decisions made by the General Assembly in years past, such as its commitment to invest $30 billion over 10 years through the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future education plan, whose strain on the state’s finances should have been predictable.” Lawmakers's attempts to pin the state’s challenges solely on President Donald Trump’s government-gutting agenda doesn’t cut the mustard, wrote the editorial board: “[T]he state’s fiscal mess was not inevitable.”
In January 2024, The Sun was purchased by Sinclair executive chairman David Smith, who has shown some affinities for conservative politics, much to the chagrin of cheeky lefty journos like NPR media correspondent David Folkenfilk, who cried that the purchase “sparked outrage and bafflement.”
Smith’s attempts to break the liberal echo chamber in media at the state level follows a string of major company moves of late that seek to redeem American media away from its notorious left-wing roots, such as Larry Ellison’s purchase of CBS News parent company Paramount Global, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’s free market reforms to the left-wing paper’s editorial page, and Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter.
It’s about time the media holds the left to account instead of always just being its pathetic, reactionary public relations foghorn.
