Last week I said I was going to write some articles about how to generate revenue for the state and city. Today I finally found some time to write about this fun topic. Last week I also went jogging in the middle of the day through some non-downtown neighborhoods of Baltimore. I noticed how there were very few small businesses or people on the street. Baltimore is set up as on big tourist based economy (beyond Hopkins, non-profits, and Government jobs). Through the years the government has given tons of money to developers and totally forgotten about small business. Productive small businesses in most neighborhoods are things of the past. We can get into this another time. For now let us deal with that fact that Baltimore depends a lot on tourists coming to our baseball games, staying at our hotels, drinking at our bars, and eating at our restaurants.
In order to generate more revenue based on the current economic structure of Baltimore we need to make all of Baltimore more tourist friendly (or we could tax JHU and the other non-profits, again I will save that one for another time). We need to make our city stick out in a good way when compared to DC or Philly. One simple way to accomplish all this is extend drinking hours until 4AM in non-residential areas. Remember that citizens of Baltimore county and all the surrounding counties are really just tourists that we need to bring to Baltimore to spend money. You better believe that young people from the entire metro area are going to flock to bars that stay open until 4AM. In DC on weekends bars only stay open until 3AM so we will have a competitive advantage over them also. Tourists from far away who come here for various reasons want to have as much fun as possible and are sometimes quite disappointed when they are kicked out of bars at 2AM. A 4AM last call is something that tourists and locals can all enjoy and something that will bring in revenue through alcohol sales and the purchase of new 4AM liquor licenses.
Making money off of alcohol is not unprecedented in this recession. Read about how some other states now realize that they need to get rid of old blue laws so they can maximize their revenue potential.
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