In the previous article we published numerous businesses that closed down that were part of the larger business chain. In this article we will mention destruction of smaller businesses.
Restaurant businesses are not just numbers, profits, chairs and cash registers but people who give jobs to students, moms and teachers during summer and who are part of our larger local community.
It is not enough to say that Governor Larry Hogan harmed Maryland’s economy. His blatant discrimination between his arbitrary “essential” and “non-essential” businesses showed to small businesses that they are not worth having and many are leaving forever.
Anne’s Paramount Steak House and Seafood Restaurant has been a landmark of Kent Narrows in Queen Anne’s County. Helen and Mike Katinas, owners of Annie’s fed the local churches and first responders with their generosity paying forward for decades. Sadly, they are forever closing their doors this 2021 Christmas.
Blackwall Hitch, and the newly opened Smashing Grapes, closed indefinitely in December 2020.
CEO of Titan Hospitality Group James King, owner of the two restaurants and several others in Anne Arundel county, shared the news with customers in a message Dec. 16. 2020
“We have spent the past several days working on budgets to determine if staying open for carry-out is a viable option,” King wrote. “Unfortunately, we have determined that we would lose thousands of dollars a week more than we will already be losing by being closed.”
Maryland’s Infrastructure is devastating. In fact Maryland received a “C” on its Infrastructure Report Card in a recent White House analysis. A recent poll by Small Business Majority found that 78% of small businesses support improving our physical infrastructure, and 76% support expanded and enhanced broadband infrastructure.
According to the U.S. News and World Report 2021, Maryland is 38 out of 50 states on its infrastructure.
As Clifton Broumand, owner of “The Man and the Machine Inc”, Maryland’s small business in Landover states in his recent publication in Marylandmatters: “What’s more, small businesses said we should pay for these improvements through a fairer tax system: 3 in 4 small businesses support a proposal that would establish a 15% minimum tax on profits that the largest corporations report to their investors. This change would go a long way toward taking the burden of paying for infrastructure improvements off small businesses like mine.”
Sadly, Marylanders may have hoped that Governor Hogan and his Commerce Secretary, Kelly Shultz, now running for Governor understood that small businesses are backbone of Maryland’s economy, but it appears that their political ambitions fogged their capacity to think about others and instead turned them into Democrats – promoting Government control and socialist central planning.
Gordana Schifanelli, an economist and Maryland attorney running as Lieutenant Governor with Dan Cox, America First candidate endorsed by President Trump told us: “Small businesses do not need government handouts. We are job creators, and we know how to run our businesses – we just need the Government to back off and leave us to do our jobs. “
