Correct. Democratic lawmakers deploy "just tax the rich" rhetoric to justify their spending - but its a bluff. Dems now represent Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and upwardly-mobile urban professionals. Even their trifectas haven't passed major new taxes since 1993.

What’s terrifying about this clip isn’t their ideals…these sweet gals’ hearts are certainly in the right place. What’s terrifying is they have the civic, political, and economic literacy of a 9 year old. When a charlatan like Abdul comes along with the Jr High class president schtick of “no more homework and the vending machines are all free!”, they fall for it. I don’t know how you get to that age with ZERO understanding of supply chains, manufacturing, labor costs…but a lot of folks think that medicine and MRIs and hospitals just materialize out of thin air like unicorn farts. They’ve never built anything in their lives, so they have no concept of how things function…things are just…there. They think milk comes from the store. They think rich people don’t pay taxes, even though the top 1% fund 40% of government with their taxes already, and yet 40% of all Americans contribute ZERO federal income tax at all. These people don’t understand that you could tax the wealthy at 100% and it would only fund the government for 120 days. Then you’re screwed. Too many Americans simply have zero understanding of how anything works, and even though they’re living in the easiest times in human history, they think things are “terrible out there”. These commie scammers roll through and promise them things that sound great, but aren’t possible in reality, and have devastating consequences if tried…but because they don’t know anything, they fall for it. Sadly, so many of our politicians and their advisors are such atrocious communicators, there’s like zero countervailing narrative to push back on the commie gobbledygook, so we are gonna have to learn the hard way. Guys…we just had a sample of socialism: Covid. We all got universal basic income, and it ended up tripling our costs and they’ll never go down. Ever. That one brief little experiment in command and control government will haunt us the rest of our lives. Bleak stuff, man. x.com/Outspoken_Sam/status/2…

What really happened after the State Dinner. The lost Xi camera roll has been found.

My lord, three IPOs are worth more than… all IPOs in the last 45 years of tech 🤯

For years Republicans said: "Just give us control of the govt and we'll slash spending," and "Big tax cuts are fine because we'll also slash spending." Well, here they are again. Unified GOP government. Big spending hikes. Zero spending cuts. Everyone falling in line. Yet again.

How a Silicon Valley Congressman uses credentialist snobbery and freshman-level errors to duck a serious debate on state control. When Silicon Valley entrepreneur David Friedberg recently warned that progressive lawmakers like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ro Khanna were coalescing power to form a modern-day "Politburo"... a self-elected elite seeking to dictate capital allocation, tax unrealized gains, and seize control over the engines of private production... he struck a nerve. The response from Representative Ro Khanna was swift, loud, and revealing. Yet, instead of presenting a rigorous defense of progressive tax schemes or explaining how state-directed capital allocation outperforms competitive market forces, Khanna resorted to a masterclass in 'populist' demagoguery. His rebuttal, a sprawling essay on X, exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of the modern progressive economic project... relying on credentialist gatekeeping, fundamental math errors, and toxic guilt-by-association. The Audacity of the Credentialist Gatekeep Khanna began his rebuttal by attempting to pull academic rank: "This is just intellectual nonsense @friedberg and wouldn't get a passing grade at a place like University Chicago in a freshman seminar. You know that." The irony of this opening salvo is almost too thick to parse. By invoking the University of Chicago, Khanna selected the global epicenter of free-market monetarism... the intellectual home of Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, George Stigler, and Ronald Coase. The "Chicago School" is defined by its deep, empirically grounded skepticism of state intervention, its defense of private property, and its rigorous insistence on price theory. If Khanna were to step into a real University of Chicago freshman seminar and advocate for wealth taxes on unrealized capital gains or state-mandated "Universal Basic Capital" equity seizures, he would be laughed out of the lecture hall. For a progressive politician to use Chicago's reputation as a shield to gatekeep economic orthodoxy while pushing policies that violate every tenant of that very institution's legacy is elite posturing of the highest order. A "Stock vs. Flow" Grade-School Math Failure Immediately after attempting to gatekeep academic rigor, Khanna committed the very error he claimed to understand... "...nearly 80 percent of Americans believe the American dream is dead, but 19 billionaires are worth as much as 12 percent of our GDP (three times the concentration of the gilded age). It's a comparison, and I get the difference between stock and flow." Saying "I get the difference" does not excuse committing the error in the very same sentence. GDP is a flow: It measures the total transactional value of all finished goods and services produced within the borders of a country over the course of one year. It is a measure of annual income. Net worth is a stock: It is the accumulated valuation of assets (real estate, corporate equity, machinery) at a single point in time. Comparing the paper net worth of 19 individuals... which consists of unrealized, illiquid equity in companies they founded (such as Tesla, SpaceX, or Amazon)... to 12% of the nation’s annual GDP is mathematically and economically incoherent. First, this "wealth" is not a liquid pool of cash sitting in a bank vault waiting to be seized. If the government forced these 19 individuals to liquidate their stock to pay a wealth tax, the massive sell-offs would trigger a catastrophic collapse in stock market liquidity. Corporate valuations would plummet, destroying the retirement portfolios of millions of ordinary working Americans, choking venture capital, and yielding only a fraction of the paper value the state intended to grab. Second, Khanna’s comparison relies on the zero-sum fallacy... the economically illiterate assumption that wealth is a fixed pie, and that because Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos owns a large slice, they must have stolen it from a nurse or a teacher. In a free-market economy, billionaires build fortunes by growing the pie... creating entirely new platforms, efficiencies, and industries that increase the productivity and standard of living of the entire society. The "Epstein" Red Herring: Guilt by Association Perhaps the most intellectually dishonest move in Khanna’s post was his pivot to toxic associations to smear the defenders of private property... "But men should not be allowed to buy politicians with their wealth and skew the laws in their favor. They should not be allowed to evade justice as we saw with the Epstein class." This is a textbook straw man. David Friedberg was defending individual liberty, private property rights, and the freedom to build enterprises. He was not defending corrupt political lobbying, regulatory capture, or the horrific crimes of Jeffrey Epstein. Khanna’s attempt to win an economic debate by conflating successful, law-abiding entrepreneurs with sex traffickers and corrupt oligarchs is a manipulative rhetorical stunt. If political corruption is the issue, the solution is to reduce the power of the state. When politicians have the power to hand out billions in subsidies, pick economic winners, and write micro-regulations, they invite billionaires to "buy" them. The cure to regulatory capture is a smaller regulatory state, not a larger one. The Central Planner’s Delusion Khanna directly challenged the capacity of private markets to allocate capital, claiming that state actors are superior... "The problem is with arrogance of those billionaires who believe they are better than us, that they are entitled to rule, that somehow they are better allocators of capital than the American people. Really? The American people who defeated Nazism and communism, funded the Moon landing and creation of the internet..." This is the classic progressive slide... conflating "the American people" with "the federal government." Private capital allocators face immediate, relentless feedback loops. They operate under the discipline of prices, profits, and losses. If a venture capitalist or entrepreneur allocates capital poorly, they suffer the loss and go bankrupt. State capital allocators (politicians and bureaucrats) operate under no such constraints. They face The Knowledge Problem identified by Friedrich Hayek. Because they do not have access to decentralized price signals, they cannot know the most efficient use of resources. Instead, government capital allocation is driven by political incentives... reelection cycles, rewarding powerful interest groups, and cronyism. Khanna's historical examples are deeply flawed... War and Space Exploration: Defeating totalitarian regimes and landing on the Moon are monumental achievements of public mobilization, but they are not models for daily commercial micro-allocation. A state can mobilize massive tax revenues to build a bomb or launch a rocket because the objective is singular and clear. It cannot, however, efficiently allocate capital to produce millions of varied consumer goods, housing, or technology. The Internet Fallacy: While the federal government funded ARPANET as a military communication project, it was the private sector, venture capital, and competitive markets that commercialized, scaled, and built the fiber-optic networks and software that turned it into an economic engine. Exploiting Labor to Mask Regulatory Failures In a bid to rally working-class support, Khanna leaned heavily on the Labor Theory of Value, contrasting hard labor with capital compounding... "...where the capital class builds fortunes in its sleep, but nurses, teachers, doctors, firefighters, carpenters, HVAC technicians who work long days can't afford to even buy a house." The economic struggles of nurses, carpenters, and teachers are real, but Khanna’s diagnosis is completely backwards. Why can't an HVAC technician afford a house? It is not because a tech billionaire in Silicon Valley is "hoarding" land. It is because of government-created supply-side bottlenecks... Restrictive Zoning Laws: Local and state governments (particularly in progressive strongholds like Khanna's home state of California) make it legally impossible or prohibitively expensive to build new, high-density housing. Inflation: Massive federal deficit spending and loose monetary policy have eroded the purchasing power of the dollar, driving up asset prices and interest rates, locking the working class out of the housing market. From 2021-2024, after democrats passed $2 trillion in federal stimulus, inflation soared to a cumulative 21.5% in just 4 years, permanently increasing the cost of living by $14,300 per year. By blaming the "capital class" for housing unaffordability, Khanna cynically diverts attention away from the catastrophic failures of municipal and federal policies... many of which he supports. Populist Theater as a Smokescreen for Power Ro Khanna’s post is a vivid illustration of the rhetorical playbook of the progressive left. When confronted with the stark reality that their policies... wealth taxes, unrealized gains taxation, and state-mandated equity grabs... closely mirror the authoritarian central planning of historical failures, they cannot defend their ideas on the merits. Instead, they pivot to 'populist' theater. They construct a moral binary, dividing the country into "pure workers" and "greedy billionaires." They drop academic names to sound authoritative while making errors that would humiliate a high school student. And they use criminal monsters like Jeffrey Epstein to smear those who believe in the simple, foundational American tenets of private property and individual freedom. David Friedberg's warning was correct. There is a rising intellectual "Politburo" in Washington. And if Ro Khanna's defensive, error-ridden tantrum is any indication, they are terrified of being exposed.

Didn’t expect this to get 1m views… wild! Robotaxis will be the largest AI market in the world this decade — at least $10T in market cap to be sliced and diced. The math is very compelling: At scale we can expect .75 a mile hard costs based on a $40,000 car being insured, cleaned, maintained, charged and monitored (uber black cars will be $80k and tesla robotaxis will be 20k) They will do ~25 rides a day ~5-6 mile ride average means it will cost $4-5 for a provider to give a ride Predict the will be offered at ~$10 so then have a 50% margin, or ~2-3x the cost of public transit Consumption will go through the roof at these prices… 1% ride sharing will turn into 30% in a decade or two. It’s going to be a 10t+ market… let that sink in!

Even the people trying to fan the flames of climate change hysteria can’t pretend like it’s ever going to seriously impact American living standards. The closest they have is energy costs, with no explanation why you need government subsidies if renewals actually are cheaper.

Ohh my god it’s true California Democrats wrote in the Billionaires Tax Bill they can amend the tax to apply to all California residents by a simply 2/3 majority with no votes needed from residents The legislative authority clause allows future 2/3 majority amendments by the Legislature (no voter approval needed) if they further the Act’s purposes This enables broadening, like lowering thresholds to include more people or making it recurring. This turns the “Billionaire Tax” into something substantially wider Section 50308 defines the scope (who qualifies as an “applicable individual”) Meaning everyone This bill is a Trojan horse

Adopting Claude speak in my regular life, episode 1: Partner: Did you do the dishes tonight? Me: Yes they're done. Partner: Why are they still dirty? Me: You're right to push back. I didn't actually do them.

Nithya killed my 48 unit project. She's working hard to kill the 59 unit project too.

🚨Breaking: The Tasmin News Telegram channel that originally released the "10-point demands" — which immediately looked like a non-starter — appears to be illegitimate. They appear to have deliberately spread misinformation on Telegram, creating a full-blown fiasco that even CNN fell for. Welcome to the fog of war.

I have a decent track record of predicting this conflict so far so here's where I see things going. (quoted tweet is from six months before we hit Fordow in 2025). Short 🧵

California refiners are cutting capacity to preserve monopoly pricing. Their executives should be in jail.