Introduction:
This is a brief story of recent findings, of a wanderer around two Red State Region cities in Western Mountain Maryland, Frostburg and Cumberland, and their economic and social tribulations. Since this is an election year, and both President Trump and Democratic treadmillers want to take credit for the allegedly splendid state of the national economy, I have to ask them, and economists like Dean Baker, who is celebrating what President Obama is said to have left us: why can I find such distress at the peak of the business cycle, before the inevitable downturn, which seems to run in 10 year cycles, give or take a year or two? And perhaps not just a downturn, perhaps the next financial crisis as the Fed tries to ease Wall Street off easy money and we find that there are no solid foundations. What I write about raises the public money-private uses boundary problem, one which plagues our two cities and indeed, all of American public life. And of course, let me pose this same challenge to Governor Larry Hogan, running for re-election, and his many Democratic challengers, a governor who has showered very conventional economic solutions upon the region, the same ones that have been on the table for decades and decades, to no real apparent effect.
As a walker in these cities, I see crumbling sidewalks, stairs, retaining walls, cracked foundations, broken windows and trash without end – right on my own street, as well as abandoned buildings, and derelict ones too – all on private property, in the hands of owners who cannot afford, or perhaps in some cases, will not invest in the obviously needed improvements. So the private squalor takes on a public face and affects the overall real estate dynamics –affects everyone, in reality. In essence, despite the cries for a return to national greatness, America, and our region too, lacks a public philosophy adequate to the problems of our times. I said that in a public forum in Rockville in 2005, where I was the guest speaker, the start of my public life in Maryland, and a Texan symbolically walked out in disgust. And now on to our story: