The Runback: "Covers all manner of sins, doesn't it?"

"The Cost of Inaction" sure is a phrase that Democrats love to use

Welcome to another week of The Runback. Have you been enjoying The Duckpin? Do you have comments or suggestions? Do you want to write for us? Let me know at theduckpin@gmail.com. And please be sure to follow on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Thanks in advance.

News and Politics

• Pride of Place is the Problem: LGBTQ Flag display a giant middle finger to most Americans

• Cause and Effect: The American electorate is becoming more conservative again. It is no small way done by how hard Democrats are pushing radical reform both politically and culturally.

• Did a Congressional Candidate Wish Death on David Trone? Controversial deleted post from Chris Hyser surfaces

• June 2023 Maryland U.S. Senate Power Rankings: Where everybody is waiting on Jamie Raskin...

• Flashback: Why Not Monorail? While Everybody gets excited about the Red Line, let's remember there is an alternative

• Moore's Interfaith Council Has No Catholics: Supermajority of Council members are Non-Christian in a state with a Christian supermajority

Sports

• A Bad Bash: 25 years ago, WCW put on a rather bad version of The Great American Bash in Baltimore

• Rob Manfred, MLB Comes for Moneyball: Rob Manfred's reign of terror over baseball now looking at spending caps for off-field matters

• Joe Biden Was Right, for Once: The WNBA's Las Vegas Aces are mad at the President for saying a true thing

The Monday Thought

Nobody is surprised that the Red Line is back. We’re all probably surprised about all the branding that went into it, no doubt paid for at taxpayer expense.

You paid for this cookie, but NO COOKIE FOR YOU

There is no way to not look like a dork wearing a t-shirt over a button-up

One of the things that Governor Wes Moore said in the big kickoff event for Red Line 2.0 is this:

“We’re still in the process of coming up with a final plan so we don’t know what the final costs can be,” said Moore. “But we do know that the costs will be in the billions of dollars. But we also know the costs of inaction and that’s an action that we’re not going to take.” 

Emphasis mine.

Wes Moore likes to talk about “the costs of inaction” a lot. He talks about it regarding trans policy, gun policy, and a host of other things. Here, he is talking about it in relation to “the cost of inaction” of building a multi-billion dollar transit system that has already been canceled once.

We know “the costs of inaction” from the last time we went through this exercise.

The Red Line has been an idea going all the way back to 2001. It could have been completed fifteen years ago had everybody just listened to then-Secretary of Transportation Bob Flanagan and created a Bus Rapid Transit network instead of holding out for the billions of dollars to create new construction of Light Rail lines. The insistence on Light Rail came up with a plan that was going to cost $2.2 billion in 2011 dollars; that’s $3 billion in today’s money, by the way.

Nobody is talking about the projected cost of the project today, because nobody actually knows. Yes, a massive announcement of a transit project that nobody knows how much it costs. Wes Moore, everybody!

Governor Larry Hogan, mercifully, put the project out of its misery in 2015 and redirected the State Funding away from a make-work program, and spent it on the highway infrastructure that was desperately neglected by Martin O’Malley’s Administration.

So if Wes Moore really wants to know what “the cost of inaction” was in relation to the Red Line cancellation, it was redirecting taxpayer money to fix needed highway infrastructure that impacts every single Marylander by redirecting state funds away from a project that was going to serve only a tiny fracture of the population at immense expense.

The question that we should be asking is what “The Cost of Action” will be. And that’s a cost that Wes Moore and company prefer you not ask about.

“The Cost of Action” will be billions in taxpayer dollars. It will be years of construction delays that will be necessary and avoidable. It will be a massive disruption of downtown Baltimore's traffic patterns and businesses. It will be a system, like the Metro and the Light Rail, that continues to cost taxpayers money each and every year without sufficient farebox recovery. And it will be a project that continues to suck money out of state coffers as ridership fails to reach projected levels.

That’s the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. Baltimore is a shrinking city. Not only is the population shrinking, but the business footprint is shrinking as more and more companies either decamp to the suburbs or move to remote work.

The only people who seem to want the Red Line are the politicians who can make like to spend taxpayer dollars at will and make sure that their union allies who put them in office get their money’s worth.

If Wes Moore really wants to talk about “The Cost of Inaction”, let’s talk about the cost of Democrats failing to act to fix Baltimore for the last sixty years. Let’s talk about the Democrats’ refusal to implement a workable plan to address the crime wave sweeping the city. Let’s talk about the tax policy that makes Baltimore completely uncompetitive when compared to the surrounding counties. Let’s talk about the rampant corruption in City Government that nobody wants to address. Let’s talk about all of the kids being failed by Democrats who refuse to take real steps to fix city schools.

But that probably sounds too much like work. It’s much easier for Wes Moore to address the cosmetic problems instead of working on the hard ones.

Wes Moore’s use of “The Cost of Inaction” reminds me of a line from Love Actually (of all things) when the Prime Minister, when speaking at a press conference about Britain’s special relationship with the U.S, says the term “Covers all manner of sins, doesn't it?"

“The Cost of Inaction” gives us a similar feeling. It is a way for Democrats to try and pull the wool over the eyes of taxpayers by trying to tell them they’re buying chicken salad instead of chicken shit.