In an effort to have budget and spending transparency, the County publishes the spendingMontgomery data dashboard that compiles revenue and spending information. You can dive into the data, and even download the data for your own analysis. We jumped into the 2023 Expenditure Ledger and downloaded the data so we could run a more comprehensive…
In 2017, Adam Pagnucco published an article entitled, MoCo’s Mighty Seven Zip Codes. The article examined the income disparities across a county that, while having a reputation for being wealthy, is actually a county with just very concentrated wealth. The article concluded, after utilizing data from 2011-2015, that: “with the exception of its wealthiest zip…
A review of information at both Treasury.gov and MarylandTaxes.gov reveals that Montgomery County politicians spent millions of future taxpayer dollars allocated to it via the so-called ‘American Rescue Plan Act’ (ARPA) on things that had nothing to do with Covid-19 disease mitigation or ‘resilience’. The final portion of this funding (via the Federal Government’s largesse…
I’ve been studying the “woke” (critical social justice) movement since the Evergreen State riots in 2017. I have always identified as a classic liberal, and I still do. I am self-employed, and one could easily argue that I work in the progress business; I earn more when my clients do well, less and sometimes none…
A brief follow-up to earlier posts where we clearly showed Montgomery County Councilmember Will (Yemi?) Jawando has made several misleading and outright false claims in official ‘proclamations’ or government communications (e-mails from his office) concerning his familial ancestry and story and how it is intertwined with Black American slavery and overcoming government-supported segregation. The most galling of these…
The Metro Washington Area’s “Council of Governments” (MWCOG or just COG) is a regional body that says on its “About Us” page / shadow box that it is: the one place in metropolitan Washington that regularly brings leaders together to develop solutions to the region’s major challenges. But has it developed solutions to the region’s major…
Though CleanSlateMoCo offers an open platform for you to submit your viewpoints, opinions and research, it is often hard putting pen to paper. We get it! You know you aren’t satisfied with the conditions of the county. You might even know specific issues that really bother you. But the writing is hard. We wanted to…
Social media has been flooded with pictures of a packed county council room with supporters holding signs and giving testimony. The perception is that there is a wide and inclusive foundation of support for the HOME Act. But is that really the case? Let’s take a closer look at who sent the participants and what…
Several years ago, even prior to being a homeowner in Montgomery County, Maryland, I came across this article by the fantastic personal finance blogger ‘Financial Samurai’. I majored in economics from the University of Maryland, so I always had an interest in this kind of thing. But even more so then basic economics, personal finance,…
During the Obama and Trump administrations, the federal government inflated the currency, but you blame the landlords for rent increases. Prices of food are going up, but you put price controls only on the landlords. Prices of insurance are going up, but you put price controls only on the landlords. Prices of fuel are going…