Creating Jobs
As a result of Maryland's highly educated workforce, proximity to Washington, DC, and thriving health care industry, Maryland's unemployment rate is well below the national average. However, this is little consolation to the 215,200 Marylanders desperately seeking high-quality jobs in June 2009.
Maryland's 440,000 small businesses have created most of the new jobs in the state in recent years. We need to be encouraging businesses with the strongest growth prospects to locate and expand in Maryland, thus planting the seeds for flourishing new industries in the technologies of tomorrow.
Helping Businesses Get Started
Raising capital for a new business has always been difficult, but today's struggling economy combined with a retrenching venture capital community has made it almost impossible to start a new business that cannot promise immediate profitability. Government and the private sector should work together to fund a seed stage venture capital fund to provide start-up capital for the most promising technology-driven companies. Very small investments can reap tremendous long-term rewards.
Separately, we need to simplify and speed up government licensing requirements. The City of Annapolis is one government entity with the reputation for being difficult to deal with, but there are many others. Make Maryland Great has found the state's Department of Assessments and Taxation particularly onerous to deal with as they don't answer their phones and require businesses in need of quick turn-around to visit their Baltimore offices in person. Restructuring these agencies following lean government principles would pay major dividends for new businesses in Maryland.
Investing in Transportation
Investing in state-of-the-art transportation systems would reduce one of the real downsides to locating in Maryland, our terribly congested roadways. Such investments would not only create thousands of jobs in the near term, but would also pay long-term dividends in encouraging more businesses to call Maryland home.