Author / Michael Fogarty
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St. Louis: Home Of The Brews
For the second year in a row, St. Louis was named the city with the “Best Beer Scene” by USA Today. St. Louis has a long history as a major beer industry hub, but the city’s ties to Anheuser-Busch aren’t driving the awards. Over the past decade, the number of breweries in the US has…
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Evaluating Candidates’ Housing Policy Proposals
Housing affordability is on many people’s minds as rents in cities like San Francisco, New York and Seattle have skyrocketed in recent years. Renters are paying increasingly high proportions of their incomes in rent as housing price growth has outstripped both inflation and wage growth. As a result, these cities are becoming too expensive for…
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The Spread Of The Sprawl
St. Louisans and Wash U students rightly criticize the city’s anemic public transportation and bike infrastructure. However, this shortage exists in the context of St. Louis’ overbuilt automobile infrastructure. St. Louis sits at the intersection of several major interstate highways that serve as the arteries of a larger network of roads that make up the…
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Splitting the Ticket: The Gap Between Statewide Races and Ballot Initiatives
Looking past the top line numbers in the House and Senate, one of the most interesting results of the midterm elections is the gap between ballot initiatives and statewide races in red and purple states. The results of the statewide races clearly show the strength of partisan polarization. Incumbent Democratic senators lost in Missouri and…
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Sorting, Polarization, And Gridlock: Policy Finds A Way
[su_pullquote align=”right”]Legislative gridlock hasn’t stopped policy from being made, it’s now just being made outside of the normal channels in ways strain our constitutional and political system.[/su_pullquote]American government is broken. Supermajoritarian institutions in the United States, most notably the Senate, have created legislative gridlock and frustrated majorities. The Senate effectively requires 60 votes to pass…
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Red Tape Blues: The Need For More Bureaucratic Independence
We often use ‘bureaucracy’ as a dirty word. Everyone has a horror story about waiting in line for hours at the DMV or spending ages trying to file their taxes correctly. Dealing with red tape has become part of Americans’ day-to-day life. [su_pullquote align=”right”]The legislative branch makes policy, but bureaucracy is how policy actually happens.[/su_pullquote]Since most…
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United We Oppose, Divided We Govern
Anyone can tell you that Republicans are on the right and Democrats are on the left. But the left and right of what, exactly? The ubiquitous left-right dichotomy assumes that political parties can be placed along a one-dimensional ideological spectrum. This political fiction underlies most partisan political rhetoric; at the same time, it is becoming…
