Andy Rebele

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

Rule by the 8%

How does 8% of a population control the laws, taxes, and economies of entire states like California and Washington?

If you want to understand the math, look at the complex cap tables of some corporations. Mark Zuckerberg wields absolute control over Meta while owning just 13% of its economic equity. The Ford family dictates the direction of the Ford Motor Company with barely 2% of the actual shares. By exploiting dual-class stock structures and supervoting shares, a tiny minority of insiders engineers control over the majority.

Public sector unions on the West Coast have built the same machine in government.

The average voter walks into the ballot box assuming their vote has the same power as every other. They're wrong. Like retail investors holding lower-voting shares, the public is just along for the ride. California and Washington are not broken democracies. They are captured monopolies, functioning as designed.

This is the dystopian reality that the tech and investor classes fundamentally misunderstand. When founders and VCs try to fight California's proposed wealth tax or Washington's new income tax, they reach for a spreadsheet, they bring data. They bring logic. They pull up projections showing that California’s wealth tax will actually cost the state $25 billion once capital flight is factored in. They treat bad policy like a bad business strategy, something to be fixed with better math.

The math is undeniably correct. And they are still losing the war.

The smartest guys in the room assume state politics is a free market of ideas where the policy that generates the most economic prosperity wins. It isn't. The unions' goal isn't to maximize the state's GDP. It's to maximize their own institutional power and revenue. If a tax throttles the broader economy but successfully funnels a billion dollars into a bucket earmarked for union members, that isn't a failure. It's the intended outcome

The Supervoting Political Share
Here is how the 8% actually captures the state. It starts with effective one-party rule. In CA and WA, Democrats routinely capture about 60% of the general electorate, making the vast majority of legislative districts completely safe. The general election is a formality; the only contest that matters is the primary.

Primary turnout is notoriously abysmal - usually 30% to 40% of registered voters. That means the primary electorate represents maybe 20% of the state’s total voting-eligible population. To win that primary, a candidate only needs a simple majority of that fraction. Run the numbers, and you realize about 10% to 11% of the total electorate is deciding who runs the state.

This is where the union deploys its supervoting share. Public sector union members make up roughly 8% of the population. But unlike the rest of the electorate, they vote as a bloc. They also supply the ground game - the call centers, the door-knockers, the war chests. A tiny, highly organized minority dictates the outcomes for candidates who go on to control supermajorities in the legislature. They outvote the remaining 90% of the state by default.

Weaponizing the Ballot
Once their candidates are seated, unions don't just trust the legislative process. They coerce it. They use the ballot initiative not as direct democracy, but as leverage.

They fund extreme, economically ruinous measures and threaten to put them on the ballot to manufacture a crisis. Lawmakers and governors, desperate to avoid the fallout, cave at the collective bargaining table just to get the union to drop the initiative. When unions do push initiatives all the way to the voters, it’s usually to ring-fence tax revenues. They write laws legally restricting how new tax buckets can be spent, ensuring the money is preemptively funneled into programs that end up paying their members.

Capturing the Referees
The next layer is changing the rules so power can never be lost. They forcibly expand their revenue base by reclassifying private home healthcare aides as public employees just to extract mandatory dues.

But the final lock on the system is the quiet takeover of the judiciary. Take Washington State. For decades, the state constitution was strictly interpreted to forbid a graduated income tax. To clear the runway for new taxes, the unions didn't just lobby the legislature; they captured the referees.

The timeline is undeniable. In 2007, zero of the nine Washington State Supreme Court justices had been appointed by a Democratic governor. That same year, unions began their coordinated push for income and capital gains taxes. Concurrently, a quiet campaign started to persuade sitting justices to retire mid-term. This allowed union-backed governors to fill the vacancies by appointment, completely shielding their preferred judges from initial open elections.

The number of appointed justices steadily rose to five, then suddenly jumped to seven, perfectly in sync with the moment the income tax finally took hold in the legislature. It’s the statistical equivalent of nearly 80% of the U.S. Senate being appointed instead of elected. It was a patient, geopolitical-style takeover: stack the court, wait out the political shifts, and take the territory without firing a single shot.

The One-Way Ratchet
Because they own the board, the union's ultimate advantage is time. The tech and investor classes view every legislative session or ballot measure as a discrete fight. The unions are playing an infinite game.

It operates as a one-way political ratchet. The defense has to spend millions to win every single time just to maintain the status quo. The union machine only needs to win once.

If a measure fails, they wait, tweak it, and try again. They test policies in controlled environments, like using the tiny city of SeaTac to pilot a radical minimum wage law. The catch? The mandate could be waived if a business signed a collective bargaining agreement. It was a structural trap designed to force employers into unionization just to survive.

When an outright state income tax proved toxic to voters, they pivoted. They passed a capital gains tax, branded it an "excise tax" to squeeze it past their newly packed Supreme Court, and shifted the legal Overton window just enough to establish the precedent they needed. They propose, iterate, litigate, and wait. Once the ratchet clicks forward, it never goes back.

Tech leaders fighting these taxes think they can optimize away a bad policy, but fail to realize they are fighting a war that was lost years ago. The system isn't going to correct itself just because someone shows that it's inefficient. For decades, the left obsessed over building a permanent majority, and failed. But the unions realized they didn't have to. You don't need to own 51% of the company if you hold the supervoting shares.

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

@VivekGRamaswamy Welcome to the new Bitcoin mining and indoor pot growing capital of the world - the data center neighborhood.

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

@USAttyEssayli @HUDgov If those are the criteria, then certainly the King County Regional Homeless Authority qualifies, as it's being kept in life support just to cash federal checks.

[Future 42 @future42org]

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson have put forth a proposal that would keep the King County Regional Homelessness Authority alive, for the primary purpose of collecting Federal dollars.

All remaining KCRHA contracts would by divided between King County and Seattle.

Meanwhile, numerous members on both the Seattle and King County Councils are still calling for the complete dissolving of the homelessness agency that has failed by every metric that matters.

This is going to be interesting..

Molly Hetherwick | @KING5Seattle
'Details for the future of regional homeless authority outlined'
Article: https://t.co/VhfYIoHrol

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

@FischerKing64 https://t.co/qwFVjXgh6I

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

@cybrtrkguy He should consider installing the Electric Era @ElectricEraTech system, which uses a big battery to peak shave, and provides management software to cap grid draw to limit demand charges. They also have various financing options.

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

@cybrtrkguy It'd be much better if Tesla incorporated a power bank into the outlet, so it could manage the power bank's SoC whole letting the car sleep most of the time.

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

@choeshow Good question. The Deputy Mayor is as Black as Kamala Harris.

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

@stevemur The 6% rate at which illegally registered voters in this data set actually voted is likely a floor. In this case, they had passed through an honesty filter (checked "no" when asked if they were citizens), and were registered involuntarily.

[stevemur @stevemur]

The teachers unions and the SEIU, the "service employees international union" are bankrolling the fight against the repeal of the income tax. (I.e., the ESTABLISHMENT of an income tax in WA, very soon, for all Washingtonians.)

Why?

Well, they are government unions. That is, the SEIU represents Medicare workers, and the teachers unions represent government education workers. Their PAYROLL comes from government. They want more government. They want more UNACCOUNTABLE government handouts. They don't particularly care about fraud, or results. They want ever-larger membership, which results in ever-larger DUES revenue, which ultimately comes from...taxpayers.

Get ready for a lot of lying.

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

@stevemur @GovBobFerguson 🎯

[Future 42 @future42org]

Confused about the Washington Supreme Court candidates about to appear on your August primary ballot? Full Court Press just released a new website that breaks down who is is running, their background, and more.

Ballots begin being mailed out on July 18th, so don't delay looking into these important races.
Link: https://t.co/LOrR7SDk5G

@FullCourtWA

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

🇺🇸

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

@sampritibh However it turns out, the videos will be awesome!

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

When i visited in about 2005, the train to the base of Machu Picchu was a private monopoly ($70 one-way then) granted to a friend of then-President Alberto Fujimori. Now his daughter is president-elect.

When I tried to enter a nightclub in a beach town south of Lima, along with an indigenous person, they were barred ("sorry we're full") but I was permitted to enter, and it wasn't close to full.

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

The only possible explanation for Dario's statement that the jailbreak is narrow is that he really thinks it is. Even if he had zero morals, a company which is essentially a long-dated bet has an extremely strong incentive to preserve and enhance its brand and its standing with regulators. No short-term advantage would justify tarnishing the brand and risking the long-term outcome or perception thereof.

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

@Gfilche @grok https://t.co/H9toJJXvtR

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

Many doom and gloom posts today cite the poor performance of big IPOs, relative to first trade or first day opening price. But that's the wrong reference point. Those considering participating in an
IPO should look at performance vs issue price. Here's that graph.

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

Many doom and gloom posts today cite the poor performance of big IPOs, relative to first trade or first day opening price. But that's the wrong reference point. Those considering participating in an
IPO should look at performance vs issue price. Here's that graph.

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

@TequilaDdad @KobeissiLetter Here's what the graph should look like

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

@TequilaDdad @KobeissiLetter This is flawed logic, as it's pegged to first-day close rather than issue price. For example, AirBnB issued at 68 and closed at 144.71. Because retail is participating in SpaceX at issue price, that's the wrong comparison.

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

@shaunmmaguire @Saronic This is a perfect application, great execution.

[Andy Rebele @andyrebele]

@choeshow Man, this is why I subscribe.