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@davidfrum David, you are reducing a multi-factor problem to two variables in order to torture the data to your narrative.
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I’m afraid the esteemed professor of history just stepped into @brivael trap using esteemed historians as his source arguing with Elon without watching his video essay.
@LeePrevost @brivael I cited several acclaimed historians: Paxton, Evans etc. Musk et al cited nobody.
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The brilliance of @brivael ‘s video essay, in addition to his novel and fresh arguments, is that he anticipated what his ideological opponents would say without even reading or responding to them.
Queue the lefty historians next.
They unwittingly stepped into the pre-sprung trap he set for them 3 moves ago on the public square chessboard.
Queue the lefty historians next.
They unwittingly stepped into the pre-sprung trap he set for them 3 moves ago on the public square chessboard.
This probably hits hard if you failed history in high school.
Hitler was a far-Right fascist whose party was named the National Socialist German Workers' Party to attract working-class voters.
Then he banned the Social Democratic and Communist parties, and sent socialists and communists to concentration camps.
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Lee Prevost retweeted
@LeePrevostter are far more even-handed.
When faced with a decision on how to handle uncertainties in the data, it's not an exaggeration to state that Piketty-Saez-Zucman always choose the approach that makes inequality increase.
Auten-Splinter tend to pick approaches that are defensible outside of that margin.
When faced with a decision on how to handle uncertainties in the data, it's not an exaggeration to state that Piketty-Saez-Zucman always choose the approach that makes inequality increase.
Auten-Splinter tend to pick approaches that are defensible outside of that margin.
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Lee Prevost retweeted
You misspelled “pocketed.”
For context, Colorado built the Greenland Wildlife Overpass, which is 1 foot shorter but 26 feet wider, for 87% less money than @GavinNewsom spent.
It's all fraud and incompetence.
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Lee Prevost retweeted
Eleven of the 12 states leading job growth since the pandemic are Republican.
Eight of the 10 slowest are blue.
At some point, Democrats should stop calling it a coincidence and start asking what they’re doing wrong.
Eight of the 10 slowest are blue.
At some point, Democrats should stop calling it a coincidence and start asking what they’re doing wrong.
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Is it the FIGs now?
Everyone is talking about Le Spread, the French-German ten-year bond yield differential, now at first euro crisis levels.
In reality, it’s much worse. During the first euro crisis, Germany still had a functioning economy and was seen as rock-solid. Today, many understand the s broken, and Germany is just buying time by issuing more debt to mask its industry’s implosion through inflated, inefficient government spending and headcount. Germany is on the path to become another failed big-government state like France, with only a few years left to pretend with more debt that its economy is stable.
Le Spread doesn’t tell the whole story. With France already in crisis and Germany slowly becoming another France, Europe and the euro are cooked. If you own euro assets, hedge them before it’s too late.
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Add to this and almost record bond yields spreads between German and French bonds - slightly shy of where it spiked during eurozone debt crisis.
Broke, entitled, overtaxed, and in debt.
Broke, entitled, overtaxed, and in debt.
France ranks #1 in taxes and social spending among developed nations, and protesters are demanding MORE of both?
What’s French for idiocy?
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Lee Prevost retweeted
@RoKhanna I predict this California wealth tax will ultimately create higher tax revenues for Florida than it will for California.
I’ll take the over. Anyone in on the under?
I’ll take the over. Anyone in on the under?
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Lee Prevost retweeted
I don't think the macroeconomics of paying for new programs by taxing unrealized capital gains works.
slowboring.com/p/obamas-forgo…
slowboring.com/p/obamas-forgo…
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Lee Prevost retweeted
The US presidency is the most dangerous office in the world.
Here are the top 3 best and worst presidents ever:
Let's start with the best:
1. Grover Cleveland vetoed 414 bills in his first term alone, including congressional handouts to drought-stricken Texas farmers in 1887, Constitution authorized no such charity. He was right.
2. Warren Harding inherited the sharp 1920-21 depression and did almost nothing, cutting federal spending from $6.4 billion to $3.3 billion and slashing tax rates. The economy recovered within eighteen months, precisely because Washington stepped aside.
3. John Tyler, largely forgotten today, vetoed a national bank bill twice, endured expulsion from the Whig Party, and refused to let Henry Clay transform the Treasury into a political instrument.
These three men share a rare quality: they treated the federal government as a cage, not a tool.
Now the worst.
3. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned 14,000 political opponents without trial, shut down opposition newspapers, and conscripted men at gunpoint. The war's financing required the Legal Tender Acts of 1862, which forced irredeemable paper greenbacks on US citizens regardless of what contracts previously specified. Centralization of federal power over the states never fully reversed after 1865. The constitutional republic that emerged was a different animal from the one that entered.
2. Woodrow Wilson delivered the Federal Reserve in 1913, the income tax through the Sixteenth Amendment, the military draft, and the Espionage Act, which could imprison anyone for criticizing the war. He segregated the federal civil service. He took the country into a European slaughter with a propaganda apparatus, the Committee on Public Information, designed to manufacture consent. Every major expansion of state power in the twentieth century traces a direct line back to Wilson's two terms.
1. Franklin Roosevelt gets the top prize for catastrophe. He criminalized gold ownership via Executive Order 6102 in 1933, forcing Americans to surrender their gold at $20.67 per ounce, then immediately revalued it to $35, confiscating roughly 41 percent of savings held in the hardest monetary form available. He extended a cyclical recession into a decade-long depression through the National Industrial Recovery Act, agricultural price controls, and relentless uncertainty about property rights. Businesses do not invest when the rules change by executive whim every quarter. Real unemployment never fell below 14 percent throughout the 1930s. He packed the Supreme Court when it resisted. The regulatory state you live inside today, with its 188,000 pages of federal rules, grew from seeds Roosevelt planted between 1933 and 1945.
Power corrupts budgets, currencies, and constitutions with equal efficiency. The best presidents understood their job was to leave you alone.
Here are the top 3 best and worst presidents ever:
Let's start with the best:
1. Grover Cleveland vetoed 414 bills in his first term alone, including congressional handouts to drought-stricken Texas farmers in 1887, Constitution authorized no such charity. He was right.
2. Warren Harding inherited the sharp 1920-21 depression and did almost nothing, cutting federal spending from $6.4 billion to $3.3 billion and slashing tax rates. The economy recovered within eighteen months, precisely because Washington stepped aside.
3. John Tyler, largely forgotten today, vetoed a national bank bill twice, endured expulsion from the Whig Party, and refused to let Henry Clay transform the Treasury into a political instrument.
These three men share a rare quality: they treated the federal government as a cage, not a tool.
Now the worst.
3. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, imprisoned 14,000 political opponents without trial, shut down opposition newspapers, and conscripted men at gunpoint. The war's financing required the Legal Tender Acts of 1862, which forced irredeemable paper greenbacks on US citizens regardless of what contracts previously specified. Centralization of federal power over the states never fully reversed after 1865. The constitutional republic that emerged was a different animal from the one that entered.
2. Woodrow Wilson delivered the Federal Reserve in 1913, the income tax through the Sixteenth Amendment, the military draft, and the Espionage Act, which could imprison anyone for criticizing the war. He segregated the federal civil service. He took the country into a European slaughter with a propaganda apparatus, the Committee on Public Information, designed to manufacture consent. Every major expansion of state power in the twentieth century traces a direct line back to Wilson's two terms.
1. Franklin Roosevelt gets the top prize for catastrophe. He criminalized gold ownership via Executive Order 6102 in 1933, forcing Americans to surrender their gold at $20.67 per ounce, then immediately revalued it to $35, confiscating roughly 41 percent of savings held in the hardest monetary form available. He extended a cyclical recession into a decade-long depression through the National Industrial Recovery Act, agricultural price controls, and relentless uncertainty about property rights. Businesses do not invest when the rules change by executive whim every quarter. Real unemployment never fell below 14 percent throughout the 1930s. He packed the Supreme Court when it resisted. The regulatory state you live inside today, with its 188,000 pages of federal rules, grew from seeds Roosevelt planted between 1933 and 1945.
Power corrupts budgets, currencies, and constitutions with equal efficiency. The best presidents understood their job was to leave you alone.
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I reread Mark Andreesen’s techno-optimist manifesto from October 2023.
What a fantastic piece that is even more relevant today. Very timely counter to the doomer narrative.
a16z.com/the-techno-opt…
What a fantastic piece that is even more relevant today. Very timely counter to the doomer narrative.
a16z.com/the-techno-opt…
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Lee Prevost retweeted
Polls Show Democrats Have Slight Lead In Early Vote-Rigging buff.ly/qacgIQV
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Those crafty mobile billionaires.
We should shackle them all in California!
Economic freedom is a problem in the USA for those that don’t want to work.
We should shackle them all in California!
Economic freedom is a problem in the USA for those that don’t want to work.
this California wealth tax thing is just incredible.
so in October 2025, a California healthcare union proposed a "one time" 5% tax on any billionaire's wealth. the ballot measure will be voted on next month. In early December 2025, California announced that it would be a ed, applying to anyone with CA residency as of Jan 1, 2026. The objective is to pay for Medi-Cal, California's incredibly dysfunctional healthcare system. (which also functions as a glorified welfare apparatus, but that's a discussion for another time).
polls reveal that the CA electorate is split around 50/50 on the tax, but prediction markets only give Prop 40 a ~23% chance of passing (there are competing measures on the ballet that would nullify it).
there are 200 billionaires in CA, worth collectively somewhere between $2.3 and $2.6 trillion. 5% of that is around $100b, accounting for a small amount of attrition. proponents of the tax forecasted a significant windfall, assuming only a 10% departure rate.
supporters thought they were being clever with the retroactive concept. no billionares would leave CA in the few short months between the tax being proposed and the residency cutoff date, without the tax even having passed yet, right?
well as it turns out, they did.
a new paper [1] from two academics at Stanford called "The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act", argues that not only did more billionaires leave due to the proposed tax than its proponents expected, but that the value of the tax, if it does pass, is actually negative.
proponents of the tax only assumed 10% avoidance, that is, only 10% of the taxable base of targeted billionaires would leave CA within the very short Oct-Dec 2025 window. Jaros and Rauh, the Stanford academics, find that a lower bound of 28.6% of the taxable base managed to leave.
just based on known departures, those departures total $577b in net worth, or $28.8b in potential tax lost. this of course does not capture everyone (many left without announcing their departure), so the authors normalize to departure rates estimated from other wealth tax events, and apply other discounts for litigation, arriving arrive at a figure of only $28-$36b in forecasted tax revenues.
but this isn't all! all of the income taxes paid by the departed billionaires are also forsaken. the authors estimate that CA billionaires pay $3.3- 5.8b in annual income taxes. they assume a midpoint of $2b lost in annual collections from departed billionaires. the net present value of that lost income stream is -$68.9 billion.
so when you add it all up you get:
+ $30b one-time tax windfall (estimated)
- $69b in present value of lost future income taxes
= - 38.9b overall net present value of the tax
of course, this analysis is highly estimate driven. the authors simulate the parameters 100k times and find a negative NPV of the implemented tax 85 percent of the time.
and if the tax doesn't pass, which it's not looking like it will, California still ended up losing at least $577b in departed net worth, and they have permanently poisoned the well with entrepreneurs who will now worry about future wealth taxes.
[1]: nber.org/system/files/w…
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Lee Prevost retweeted
@bennyjohnsonle like @nickshirleyy @nickshirleyyefeII@JamesOKeefeIIIhis parade started.
Politicians will run along and look like they are leading the parade but I see who started it. And that’s OK. You both needed the incentives to change and for your work to result in consequence.
Thanks for persevering!
Politicians will run along and look like they are leading the parade but I see who started it. And that’s OK. You both needed the incentives to change and for your work to result in consequence.
Thanks for persevering!
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Lee Prevost retweeted
🚨 BREAKING: President Trump and VP JD Vance just unveiled a $25 MILLION program that PAYS everyday Americans to expose FRAUD
The Somalis are going to start SNITCHING on each other left and right 🤣🔥
You'll get a COMMISSION for any fraud you expose and can prove.
1% on $400 xample, is $4,000,000 CASH in your pocket.
It's called the Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program, or WHIP, and it'll be run by the DOJ.
Tips that lead to fraud convictions or major enforcement actions can earn up to $30,000.
It builds on Vance's White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which is going after schemes like the $250 MILLION Feeding Our Future scam that stole from children's nutrition programs.
LET'S GO!!! Time to get PAID for catching the crooks 🔥
The Somalis are going to start SNITCHING on each other left and right 🤣🔥
You'll get a COMMISSION for any fraud you expose and can prove.
1% on $400 xample, is $4,000,000 CASH in your pocket.
It's called the Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program, or WHIP, and it'll be run by the DOJ.
Tips that lead to fraud convictions or major enforcement actions can earn up to $30,000.
It builds on Vance's White House Task Force to Eliminate Fraud, which is going after schemes like the $250 MILLION Feeding Our Future scam that stole from children's nutrition programs.
LET'S GO!!! Time to get PAID for catching the crooks 🔥
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My ask to democratic socialists like Tony:
If the rightful and legal heirs of wealth didn’t do anything to earn it, then who is?
Who is the better allocator of that wealth? The one who created it? Or the re-distributor?
If the rightful and legal heirs of wealth didn’t do anything to earn it, then who is?
Who is the better allocator of that wealth? The one who created it? Or the re-distributor?
Yes!!! Inheritance taxes are the fairest taxes as heirs didn’t do a damned thing to earn this wealth.
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Amazing and inspiring.
Fraudsters like the “Learing Center” now on notice.
Kudos @nickshirleyy and @JamesOKeefeIII for driving change!
Politicians now having to get in front of this parade. But that’s OK. You brought focus and attention to it!
Fraudsters like the “Learing Center” now on notice.
Kudos @nickshirleyy and @JamesOKeefeIII for driving change!
Politicians now having to get in front of this parade. But that’s OK. You brought focus and attention to it!
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