In my job, I help lower-income people with inheritance issues, and they encounter so many needless barriers to prosperity. They are creations of the law, and the General Assembly needs to fix them. While there are many legitimately controversial issues, those aren’t the ones I’m talking about. The issues I see are ones that would be repealed if the legislators were fully informed and willing to do the right thing.

I used to think that the legislators just need better information so they can make better laws, but I’m increasingly feeling that legislators often make bad laws even when they have access to the right information. It could be that they listen to the wrong people, they don’t have a grasp of how the whole system works or they put politics over policy. I’m running because we need laws that work and that work for everyone.

I admire the Republicans that stand up to President Donald Trump. It takes courage to take a stand against the leader of your own party in our system that rewards partisan purity. I’m thinking of Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger, the governor and secretary of state of Georgia who refused Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election there. Despite both personally wanting Trump to win, they stood their ground and upheld democracy. I’m also thinking of the Indiana Republicans who rejected Trump’s plea for mid-decade gerrymandering. We need more politicians who will put democracy over party, principle over politics, integrity over power and character over conformity.

I do support Gov. Wes Moore’s strategy, and I don’t. I support it in the sense that tough decisions need to be made regarding the budget and some mixture of service cuts and tax increases is probably the best solution. With any change to the budget, my commitment is to do the most good and the least harm. But, the answer must be based on the specifics of the proposal, not a general philosophy of government. I also support the governor’s move to repeal the inheritance tax, which is a tax on non-wealthy people that don’t have children.

But, I have concerns about the governor’s overall tax strategy. First, I do not support the solution to the budget problem last year which was to raise fees instead of taxes, because fees are just hidden taxes that usually burden the poor more than the rich. Second, taxing the rich is a tricky business because they are the most likely to be able to avoid taxes. Raising the Maryland estate tax won’t work because you can avoid it easily with a trust. Raising income taxes or capital gains is tricky because the rich can just avoid them by living in Florida for 51% of the year. According to the comptroller, rich old people have been leaving the state at the highest rates. We need to tax the rich, but we need tax policy that is progressive and pragmatic.

This is a big problem, but unfortunately it’s a complicated problem with little to fix it in the short-term. Data centers are driving up prices but they’re mostly located in Virginia, so there’s no way for Maryland to pass on the costs to them. We can stop data centers from being built in Maryland but we can’t stop out-of-state data centers from driving up electricity costs.

Maryland has required increasing amounts of energy to be from renewable sources, but we haven’t had a corresponding increase in renewable energy production in Maryland. So, we just end up buying more and more energy from other states. This puts us at the mercy of prices of electricity in other states and it drives up the cost of transmitting electricity.

Maryland has made itself more and more dependent on out-of-state energy. We need a more balanced approach. We need to match our principles with pragmatism. It’s not enough to signal our virtues of progressivism, but we need to have a whole solution. If we’re going to mandate renewable energy, we need to be willing to step on toes to make it happen here.

In my job, I help people get access to the most affordable housing they could get - the house that is already theirs but hasn’t been legally inherited yet. Maryland has so many needless barriers to probate that disproportionately affect low-income people, such as the nominal bond requirement, publication requirement, probate fee, lien certificate, etc. Faced with so many barriers, these homes often end up lost, especially in tax sale and become vacant and abandoned. That is affordable housing and generational wealth lost because of bad laws.

To make low-income housing more affordable, I would make property taxes slightly progressive, meaning that the tax rate is higher for wealthier people, such as by exempting the first $50,000 of the assessed value for occupied residential properties and increasing the rate overall to compensate. First, property taxes are effectively regressive, meaning it’s a higher burden on people with less wealth, so this will counteract that. Second, this will make housing more affordable for renters and homeowners instead of leaving low-income renters to pay the full property taxes through their rent. Third, it’s far easier to implement than the current homeowner tax credits so it can actually help everyone who needs it, not just the ones who get through the bureaucracy.

Lastly, the issue of home prices is the issue of home supply. The General Assembly may need to step on some toes to make it easier to build. Zoning and permitting are major roadblocks to building more housing and cheaper housing.

I don’t know enough about the quantum computing or biotech industries to know whether or not this is a good investment. But these will probably never be pillars of our economy.

An issue that is far more important to the economy is providing an adequate education to all our residents. The lifetime productivity of each resident is largely determined during their childhood through their education. To unlock the economy, you need to unlock human potential.

I was a high school math teacher for a community high school in the city for two years. The students there were really failed in extreme ways. Even the best students could not get an adequate education and many students learned very little. Probably my biggest takeaway from the experience is that this isn’t primarily the student’s fault or the parent’s fault or the teacher’s fault. The system itself crumbles under the weight it’s given to bear. One necessary ingredient to build the schools up is more funding. The system fails these kids year after year. My friend dropped out of Baltimore City Schools more than fifty years ago, and he only learned to read in prison as an adult. How much human potential have we wasted? How long will we continue to waste it?

I support the ban on local-ICE partnerships through the 287(g) program. I believe that immigrants, documented or not, are made in the image of God and so we must treat them with dignity and value their life. That’s not what we’ve see from ICE in Minneapolis. So, we do need to send a strong signal that we do not support how ICE has been operating.

ICE has the job of enforcing our immigration laws. They need to do that in a way that shows the dignity and value of all human lives. The police have a different job - to keep people safe. We need everyone to trust the police so that they will cooperate with the police. We need people to feel safe to report crimes and serve as witnesses so that violent criminals can be apprehended. Otherwise, everyone is less safe. The police undermine their ability to do their real job when they try to do ICE’s job too.

The tax sale is a leech on our society, draining resources from our lowest-income residents for the profit of faceless corporations and their lawyers. If you don’t pay your property taxes, then the government sells your debt to a debt buyer, who then gets to charge egregious levels of interest and fees. At this point, you have to pay whatever they charge, or you lose your house and get a fraction of the equity that is rightfully yours. So, most people end up paying the extortion.

The fees and interest for an unpaid property tax bill on a modest home in Baltimore City comes to about a 195% annual interest rate. That’s six times as much as your credit card is legally allowed to charge. And this overwhelmingly affects low-income and Black areas of the city. And that’s on top of the fact that property taxes are a higher rate in practice on lower-wealth homes.

There are two reasons why it exists. First, it’s convenient. The city gets paid when the debt buyer buys the debt, and the city doesn’t have to get its hands dirty threatening anyone’s house directly. Second, it’s very profitable for the debt buyers so they actively get in the way of reform.

Untold millions of dollars are siphoned from the lowest-income residents in west Baltimore each year. And it’s been going on for decades now. Stopping this injustice is my highest priority once elected.