Michael Bell
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Looking for Someone to Admire? Try Esther Wells.
Read more: Looking for Someone to Admire? Try Esther Wells.Of Montgomery County’s approximate 675,000 voters, less than 1% (far less than 1%) are Libertarians. That means pretty much everyone reading this column isn’t familiar with a pro-choice stream of consciousness, so I’ll share with you mine as I take an escalator down to a Metro station. “Why am I paying $7.50 to get to…
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Mandatory Reserve Studies: Another Blow for Affordable Housing
Read more: Mandatory Reserve Studies: Another Blow for Affordable HousingIn 2021 there was a terrible collapse of a condominium building in Surfside, Florida. The subsequent investigation revealed that as far back as 2018 an engineer had warned of cracking in the pool deck which could result in a catastrophic structural failure. The condo association did not take any corrective action until April 2021, when…
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Stewart’s Cognitive Dissonance Regarding Constructive Evictions
Read more: Stewart’s Cognitive Dissonance Regarding Constructive EvictionsCouncil Member Kate Stewart recently stated that “any rent increase over 10 percent is known as a constructive eviction. Constructive eviction is a landlord’s effort to remove a tenant through means other than a formal eviction.” This comes from someone who just voted to raise property taxes by 10 percent. That move, presumably, has nothing…
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The Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, and Local Rent Control
Read more: The Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, and Local Rent ControlMoCo reformers (Democrat, Independent, and Republican alike) often bemoan the conflation of national politics with local electoral races. Last year the Republicans fielded their best candidate in a generation for county executive, Reardon Sullivan, and he came up short by quite a margin. Hard line Democrats in this county, and even more so the progressives,…
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Not All Supremacists Are White
Read more: Not All Supremacists Are WhiteCouncil Member Mink associated middle schoolers with white supremacists and bigots. That was very hurtful. After all, not all supremacists are white. Bigots and white supremacists routinely use, albeit with declining efficacy, voting rights violations to block out people not like them from winning elections. As noted in a previous post, the entire Board of…
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Mink Brings School Vouchers One Step Closer
Read more: Mink Brings School Vouchers One Step CloserNo, Council Member Mink didn’t say these Moslem children are “just like bigots.” Nevertheless, would you want to send your children to a school where one of the top administrators says they are on the same side as bigots? I’m not part of the thought police crowd, and to me it’s a reasonable proposition to…
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The Opt-Out Rally and the No-Choice Illusion
Read more: The Opt-Out Rally and the No-Choice IllusionThere are a three commonplace events that make me pause and feel how fortunate I am to be an American. One of them is when buying paper towels and toilet paper from Costco. It’s difficult to find a more effective combination of mass production, mass consumption, voluntary exchange, impeccable quality control, and a large corporation…
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Five reasons you should move to Fairfax County
Read more: Five reasons you should move to Fairfax CountyFairfax County’s County executive (actually, chairman of the Board of Supervisors) is Jeffrey McKay. Here are the highlights from his May 31, 2023 newsletter. Fairfax County-resident labor force is the largest it has ever been. Employers are looking to fill over 70,000 jobs in the county. Fairfax County government needs “to keep our foot on…
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The Losers and Winners of Rent Control in MoCo
Read more: The Losers and Winners of Rent Control in MoCoThe social-justice crowd claims that rent control is the only way to protect defenseless tenants against their oversized landlords. (The previous four posts in this series have shown that the only actor with oversized power in the county’s housing market, and the only actor to blame for the shortage of affordable housing is the county…
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Will Jawando – A Legacy of Control, Punishment, and Favoritism
Read more: Will Jawando – A Legacy of Control, Punishment, and FavoritismCouncilmember Will Jawando is well into his second term, after winning only 17% of the votes in the 2022 Democratic primaries. In this post we list the bills for which he is the only sponsor, and provide a brief analysis. Legislative Initiatives Below are all the council enactments for which CM Jawando was the only…