Bill Angsten

manufacturing, politics, sports

[Bill Angsten @BillAngsten]

Illinois provides a case study in how Democrats change the rules to limit political competition and entrench one-party, public-union rule. https://t.co/IfEJWuSw9t

[Jeff Orr @JeffO773]

NEW: Ken Griffin on Paris riots, Chicago and JB Pritzker

I think Paris should be a real wake up call to every single young American. France is the dream the left talks about. That dream is the nightmare I left from Chicago. That dream doesn’t belong in our country. A society that comes down to how much you can take from others.

Do you see candidates that you’re actually fearful that’s the path they’re going down:

J.B. Pritzker, Governor of Illinois. Yes, 100%. 100%

[FischerKing @FischerKing64]

The playbook will go something like this: 1) win back the House and Senate, and hopefully the Presidency in 2028; (2) admit DC and Puerto Rico as states, which doesn’t need a constitutional amendment, to gain 4 new Senate seats and cement control; (3) pack the Court, which only requires a change to the Judiciary Act of 1869, not a constitutional amendment; (4) eliminate the electoral college, which is unconstitutional, but not when you have a rigged court that finds the ‘loophole’; (5) flood the country with pliant migrants, swamp the natives, and hold power indefinitely.

[Israel War Room @IsraelWarRoom]

We call on France to exercise restraint when dispersing the freedom fighters on the streets of Paris. These brave warriors for justice must receive immediate humanitarian aid, and their safety must be guaranteed in accordance with international law. Failure to comply will leave us no choice but to bring a case before the ICJ, in close cooperation with that renowned champion of human rights, Afghanistan.

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

Premise:

Incentives drive all human behavior.

The corollary:

How to destroy a country:

A vast social security and support system that serves as a magnet for those who would rather not work.

An open immigration policy that does not screen immigrants to determine their ability and willingness to provide for themselves and their families.

An open immigration policy that does not screen for political and/or religious ideologies that are a threat to the country.

Economic incentives large enough to incentivize immigrants on the state dole to have large numbers of children, but insufficient for educated and economically productive mothers to be able to quit to raise a family.

The declining fertility of the most educated and productive women due to their delay to begin a family as a result of their desire and/or need to advance their careers, among other reasons, to live a life they deem consistent with their educational achievements and/or to repay their student debts.

Amnesty programs that give citizenship and voting power to illegal immigrants without consideration of their economic productivity or their threat to the country due to their religious or political ideologies.

The changing demographics and increased population due to the above factors.

The state responding to protests by increasing social support.

The continued failure to punish and hold accountable violent and looting rioters.

Government managed by a massive and growing unelected bureaucracy.

Government fraud, waste, and abuse contributed to ballooning budgets.

Anti-business legislation that makes it difficult for businesses to compete in a global marketplace being disrupted by AI, including restrictions on firing even poorly performing employees.

Overly burdensome, globally uncompetitive, corporate taxation.

Continuous increases in personal taxes to raise funds to provide for the rapidly growing welfare state.

The substantial majority of the tax burden levied on a small percentage of the population.

A growing percentage of the electorate paying no taxes and receiving welfare.

The introduction or threat of a wealth tax including the taxation of unrealized gains, i.e., taxes on paper wealth.

The flight of the most productive business builders and highest taxpayers to lower tax countries with lesser security concerns.

A growing percentage of the electorate voting for candidates that support increased welfare and laws favorable to, and/or that match the cultural and ideological needs and desires of a growing unproductive immigrant population.

The rapid rise in anti-semitism and inadequate efforts to address this hatred.

Increased borrowing by the state to fund the growing social burden.

Higher sovereign interest rates due to all of the above.

The resulting need to reduce expenditures to make the math work.

Increasingly violent protests that make life less livable for the productive and law abiding citizens leading to their accelerated departure.

And so on…

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

Pick your fighter, America:

Elon or Ilhan.

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Tiger Woods Unimpressed With Roadster As He's Flipped Dozens Of Vehicles https://t.co/Y2zkWm9J1i

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

If you're a young American, or a Democrat who's a little confused about where all this is going, read this. It's long. It's worth it.

Start with misery.

For almost all of human history, misery wasn't a crisis. It was the default. Your ancestors were born poor, lived poor, buried half their children, and died poor. Around 1800, roughly 9 out of 10 humans lived in what we'd now call extreme poverty. Even kings lived worse than you: no antibiotics, no anesthesia, no light after sunset.

Today it's around 1 in 10.

That didn't happen because someone finally designed the perfect system. It happened because, in a few corners of the world, people were left free enough to trade, try, fail, and try again. Property rights. Prices. Contracts. Rule of law. Boring words. They built everything you have.

Now meet Friedrich Hayek.

An Austrian economist who watched his continent fall to two ideologies that both promised to organize society from the top. In 1944 he wrote The Road to Serfdom. A year later he wrote a short essay that should be required reading in every high school: The Use of Knowledge in Society.

His insight is simple and devastating. The knowledge needed to run an economy doesn't exist in one place. It's scattered across millions of heads: the baker who knows flour just got expensive, the nurse who knows which shift is understaffed, the farmer who knows his soil. No committee, no ministry, no genius can gather it all. Prices are the miracle that lets all that knowledge talk to itself without anyone being in charge.

When you replace prices with plans, you don't get a smarter economy. You get a blind one.

His friend Karl Popper made the same point about history itself in The Poverty of Historicism, a book dedicated to the countless people who died because someone believed history had a destination and that he alone knew the way.

Then the 20th century ran the experiment. Not once. Everywhere.

The Soviet Union was planned from Moscow. It collapsed in 1991, after famines, gulags, and bread lines in a country with some of the best farmland on earth.

Mao's China gave us the Great Leap Forward and tens of millions dead of hunger. Then Deng opened markets in 1978, and roughly 800 million people escaped extreme poverty. Same people. Same culture. Different rules.

Korea: same peninsula, same language, same ancestors. Look at a satellite photo at night. One half is lit. The other is dark.

Germany: one nation split in two. The side that called itself the workers' paradise had to build a wall to stop its workers from leaving.

Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves on the planet. Nearly 8 million people have fled it.

Cambodia lost about a quarter of its population in the name of starting over from year zero.

Every time. Different continents, different cultures, different leaders, same ending. At some point it's not bad luck. It's the design.

"But I mean Denmark." Fair. But Denmark isn't socialist. Its own prime minister told a Harvard audience in 2015 that Denmark is a market economy. The Nordics are free-market countries that chose to fund a big welfare state with the wealth markets created. That's a debate worth having. It's not the same debate.

Now let me tell you about my country.

France is the closest thing the developed world has to a live test of "the state will take care of it." Public spending is around 57% of GDP, among the highest on earth. Public debt is above 110% of GDP. The national education system employs over a million people, one of the biggest employers in the world.

And right now, French high school students are blockading hundreds of schools. Their complaints: not enough teachers, crumbling buildings, overloaded schedules. On October 1st, the entrance hall of a high school in Nantes was destroyed by a deliberate fire during a blockade.

Read that again. In the country that spends more than almost anyone and centralizes more than almost anyone, kids are in the street because the system can't give them a teacher and a building that works.

And the demand you hear most? More funding. More state. More of what built the problem.

I'm French. I get the anger. The anger is legitimate. The diagnosis is backwards.

One ministry in Paris trying to run thousands of schools is Hayek's problem in miniature. The principal knows which teacher is missing. The parents know which roof leaks. The ministry knows a spreadsheet.

So here's what I want to say to every young person, in France or in America, who's tempted by the idea that the system just needs more power to finally get it right:

You're allowed to want it. That's your right. But you don't have to guess. You have something no generation before you had: the full archive. Every experiment has been run, documented, photographed, counted. The famines have numbers. The walls have dates. The boat people have names. The night photo of Korea is one click away.

Your ancestors paid for that knowledge. Some with their savings, some with their freedom, many with their lives. They left you the results.

Respect your ancestors. Read what they left you.

Read Hayek. Read Popper. Read Solzhenitsyn. Read Orwell, who was a socialist and still told the truth about totalitarianism.

And then build. Because the thing that pulled humanity out of misery was never a plan. It was millions of free people trying things.

That's you. That's the job.

[Dominie 🇺🇸 @price_dominie]

Actual adults vote for Republicans. That statement may anger you, but I’ll say it again; those with a level of discernment beyond that of a child vote for Republicans.

I don’t do a massive amount of politics on here, or truthfully, in real life. I have no love for politicians, they are merely a necessary evil. Why the statement?

Actual adults understand a few things…

The current Democratic Party refuses to accept the science of biology, stymy the flow of illegal aliens, identity voters through ID, recognize your Right to firearms (as outlined in the 2nd Amendment), and reject the ideas of Karl Marx as incongruent with the Constitution. They play games on the State level to block those who seek to reveal corruption and fraud. They literally named a law after Nick Shirley to prevent others like him from revealing massive scams in their State like he did in Minnesota. These are not the actions of rational adults, but rather emotional, power-hungry children who seek to upend our Nation as long as they personally benefit.

I am under no delusion that Republicans will deliver everything I want. They have been tepid at best the past two years. I’m also no Trump sycophantic. Many of his positions would have been considered middle-ground in the 1990’s Democratic Party. He and the Party he leads have managed to deliver a few victories in areas that matter. The southern border is the most secure that it’s been in my lifetime. The NFA is currently starving for oxygen. Some common sense has been applied to preventing men from parading as women to crush their athletic dreams and act as government endorsed voyeurs in bathrooms.

Trump is bombastic and publicly treats the Office of the Presidency as a celebrity position. Behind the scenes, it’s clearly different. I highly approve of some of the moves he’s made and shake my head in frustration at others.

Trump is not on the ballot this election. Who is? Local representatives and managers, many House Representatives and some Senators; for some of you Mayor or County Sheriff. These are the people whose decisions will truly impact your life regardless of what the man who is not up for reelection does.

Rational adults vote for the representation that doesn’t promise to steal what you have, give it to noncitizens, take away your right to self-defense, upend our founding documents, and allow the replacement of equal justice with Sharia law. The current Democratic Party endorses ideas that indoctrinate your children into ideas that prevent you from ever having grandchildren. They support that which will literally end your family line; they gain power and you lose your legacy. At this point in time, that rational option is by and large the Republican Party.

Will Republicans likely fail to live up to all of their campaign promises? Beyond a doubt. A mature adult knows that and yet understands the opposite choice is guaranteed destruction. Naïve children make choices on emotions, “the feels”, promises of free stuff and believing that politicians won’t disappoint them. Rational adults stoically weigh the options based on projected course and values.

The Iran war will not immediately end no matter which way you vote. Gas prices also don’t turn on a dime. No matter who you choose, inflation will not immediately disappear and Congress will spend money. I have my gripes, as do you. They are valid. National suicide is not the answer.

Until the Democrats produce another JFK like option, eschew their current values and platform, you must do your job as a rational adult and block them at the voting booth and in the public square. Anything less is puerile.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Bernie Sanders says the top 1% owns more than the bottom 93%, that fewer than a thousand billionaires got $2.2 trillion richer last year, and that it's "obscene."

It's the most seductive and most wrong economic argument of our time. Let me explain why.

First, wealth distribution follows a power law. Always. Everywhere. Books, music, startups, followers on X, goals in soccer. A small minority captures most of the value. That's not a bug of capitalism. It's the mathematical signature of every system where value gets created.

So the only question that matters isn't "how big is the rich's slice?" It's "is the cake growing, and is the slice of the poorest growing with it?"

And the answer is yes. In 1990, more than one human in three lived in extreme poverty. Today it's about one in ten. During exactly the period when billionaires multiplied.

Bernie shows you the slice. He never shows you the cake.

Second thing he won't tell you: past a certain level, wealth stops being consumption. It becomes capital allocation.

Elon Musk isn't sleeping on a pile of cash. He owns stakes in Tesla, SpaceX, xAI. Jeff Bezos owns Amazon stock. That "$2.2 trillion" isn't sitting in a checking account. It's factories, rockets, data centers, millions of jobs. Nobody can eat $100 billion. You can only decide where to invest it.

Once you understand that, the whole debate changes. The real question becomes: who allocates capital better?

The people who built Amazon, SpaceX and Nvidia? Or politicians?

A 5% wealth tax isn't "taking money from the rich." It's taking investment decisions away from people who proved they can create value and handing them to people who proved the opposite.

Because the fundamental difference between an entrepreneur and a politician is consequences.

The entrepreneur invests his own money. If he allocates badly, he loses everything. The market corrects him brutally, no appeal. That's why most startups die: the system kills bad decisions.

The politician invests other people's money. If he allocates badly, nothing happens. Worse, he gets a bigger budget to "fix the problem."

Milton Friedman put it better than anyone. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you care about price and quality. Your money on others: you care about price. Others' money on yourself: you care about quality. Others' money on others: you care about nothing.

Government is the fourth box. By design.

Perfect example: California high-speed rail. Approved in 2008 for about $33 billion. Current estimated cost: over $100 billion. Passengers carried: zero. No entrepreneur would have survived that. The politicians who pushed it built careers on it.

And when allocation has no consequences, it eventually finds a buyer. A politician who controls billions without accountability becomes the most profitable target in the world for anyone who wants to steer that money.

The irony is that the left that rails against billionaires is itself funded by billionaires. George Soros is one of the biggest Democratic donors in history. The Gates Foundation shapes public health policy across the planet.

Politicians don't fight billionaires. They pick their own. The ones who fund the state over the ones who compete with it.

So if we actually want fewer poor people, we have to stop judging ideas by their intentions and start judging them by their results. And the results are brutally clear.

China, 1978: Deng Xiaoping opens the economy to markets. More than 800 million people escape extreme poverty. The largest retreat of misery in human history. Not through redistribution. Through the freedom to build.

India, 1991: liberalization. Same movie.

South Korea and North Korea: same people, same language, same starting point in 1953. One became one of the most advanced economies on earth. The other has famines.

Poland and Ukraine: comparable living standards in 1990. Today the average Pole is more than three times richer than the average Ukrainian.

Argentina: a year and a half of liberalization, and the poverty rate falls from over 50% to around 30%.

No country in history escaped poverty by punishing the people who build. Every single one did it by letting them build.

And if you want to see what Bernie's program looks like in real life, you don't have to imagine it. It exists. It's called France. We've been running it for 45 years.

Mass nationalizations in 1981. Two years later, Socialist president Mitterrand has to reverse course into austerity.

Retirement at 60. The 35-hour workweek.

A wealth tax for 35 years. Hundreds of wealthy households left every year for Belgium, Switzerland, London, taking their capital, their companies and their future taxes with them. Macron finally scrapped it in 2018.

Hollande's 75% tax: raised a few hundred million, drove talent out, abandoned after two years.

One of the highest tax burdens in the OECD. Public spending around 57% of GDP, a record in the developed world.

Last balanced budget: 1974. Public debt: over €3.4 trillion. Mass unemployment for four decades.

If taxing the rich and growing the state made people prosperous, France would be the richest country on the planet.

It isn't. GDP per capita in France is barely more than half of America's. It's lower than Mississippi, the poorest state in the US. Not a single global tech giant. Our best engineers build Silicon Valley instead. I've been going back and forth between Paris and San Francisco for years. I see it every week.

And California is about to replay the movie. Prop 40, on the ballot November 3rd, would take 5% of billionaires' net worth. Even Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor, opposes it. The state's own nonpartisan budget analyst warns that income tax revenue could drop every year if the wealthy leave. Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel have reportedly already started moving their assets out.

You don't fight poverty by shrinking the top. You fight it by growing the cake.

Bernie wants a society where nobody has too much. I want a society where nobody has too little.

The first has been tried everywhere and produces equality in stagnation. The second lifted a billion people out of misery.

Choose.

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

A lot of uneducated people fall into this capitalism vs public trap. So let me explain why the "public" side of this debate comes down to one thing: it doesn't work.

And it's not because the State is evil. It's because the State is made of people. Same people as everywhere else. Same incentives, same laziness, same temptations. The only difference is whose money they're spending.

Milton Friedman nailed it. There are four ways to spend money. Your money on yourself: you watch the price and the quality. Your money on someone else: you watch the price, less the quality. Someone else's money on yourself: you stop caring about the price. Someone else's money on someone else: you care about neither. Every public budget on earth lives in that fourth box.

Now let me explain it like you're 8. Picture a schoolyard. 100 kids, Pokémon cards handed out at random. Nobody plans anything. Kids trade, collectors sort, good players accumulate. Very quickly every card ends up with the kid who values it most. Then the teacher walks in, decides it's unfair, confiscates everything and redistributes it herself. Problem: she has no idea who wants what. She can't. Nobody can. Trades stop, good players quit, and somehow the kids sitting closest to her desk end up with all the rare cards.

That last part is the one everyone forgets. When money flows from a central desk instead of voluntary trade, the winners are the people who know the desk best. Lobbyists, connected contractors, consultants billing 10x. California high-speed rail: budget tripled, still no train. That's not a bug, it's what happens every single time someone spends money that isn't theirs, on people they'll never meet, with zero consequences if they fail.

And here's the irony in your take. The capitalists who love public infrastructure the most are the cronies who win the contracts. That's not the free market. That's the exact opposite of it.

The free market is the only system where bad allocators lose their money and good allocators get more to allocate. Profit is the signal. Losses are the correction. The State has neither. A failing company goes bankrupt. A failing ministry gets a bigger budget next year.

So if you actually care about the common good, you should want more free market, not less. Freedom means the freedom to build, to trade, to keep what you create. It does not mean the freedom to hand other people's money to people who've proven they don't know how to invest it.

The question was never capitalism vs public. It's who allocates the next dollar best. 200 years of data, same answer every time.

[Apple Lamps @lamps_apple]

Ro, thanks for the Wisconsin history lesson. You skipped the ending.

In 1911 Wisconsin's income tax started at 1% on income over $1,000, about $18,500 today. Most people paid nothing. It was sold as a tax on the few.

Today Wisconsin taxes working families starting at 3.5% and tops out at 7.65%. Washington copied the idea in 1913, and fewer than 10% of Americans paid it as late as 1939. Now it's in every paycheck.

That's the real lesson of 1911... a tax on "the few" is how you build the machine that taxes everyone.

And California already did this before... Prop 30 in 2012 was a "temporary" tax on high earners. Prop 55 extended it to 2030. Temporary in Sacramento means forever.

Now look at Prop 40...

A 5% grab on net worth, which means paper wealth and private company stock valued by a state formula, not money anyone actually made.

Written into the state Constitution, with a clause letting the Legislature amend it by a two-thirds vote if it "furthers the purposes" of the act.

"One-time" money for permanent health programs. When it runs out, guess who they come for next.

Even Gavin Newsom says it "makes no sense" and is "really damaging to the state."

Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Peter Thiel didn't wait around to find out. The LAO warns the state loses income tax revenue every year after the ones who leave are gone.

And his chart makes the case against you... 5% "takes them back 31 days." So this wrecks California's reputation for capital, chases out the people who pay a huge share of the income tax, and doesn't even dent the "inequality" you claim to care about.

It's not innovative. It's the oldest socialist trick there is... promise it's only them, then come for you.

Vote NO on 40.

[Stephen Moore @StephenMoore]

Want to understand the affordability crisis? Look at the blue states with the highest costs of living.

Trump’s first-term inflation averaged 2%. Under Biden, it averaged 5%.

Why would anyone trust Democrats to fix the problem their policies have made worse?

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

My post about France went viral. Thousands of likes. Many Americans told me: "Democrats aren't socialists. America will never be France." I want to answer that seriously, step by step.

Start with a simple observation. Look at what has gotten cheaper in America over the last 25 years: TVs, phones, software, clothes, toys. Now look at what has exploded: college tuition, healthcare, childcare, housing.

What separates the two lists? The first lives in competitive markets. The second is exactly where government is most involved: subsidies, mandates, licensing, zoning, regulation.

College. Washington lends students almost unlimited money. Universities know the money will always come, so they raise tuition and hire more administrators. The student pays the bill for twenty years. More government money, higher prices.

Housing. Why can't a nurse buy a home in the city where she works? Not because of capitalism. Because of zoning laws, permits, environmental reviews, years of procedure to build a single building. The most expensive places to live in America are the places where it's hardest to build. When building is nearly illegal, prices explode.

Healthcare. The patient almost never sees the price. A third party pays, regulations limit who can compete, and costs climb year after year with no one able to say no.

So here is the trap. The problems you suffer from are not the failure of free markets. They are the places where the market has already been replaced by the state. And the solution you're being offered is more of the same.

That's the Trojan horse. It always works the same way. A real problem. A generous-sounding promise. A program that makes things worse. Then the failure of that program becomes the argument for the next one. People who lived under communism in Poland learned to recognize the lie and the mask the lie wears. The lie never presents itself as a lie. It presents itself as compassion.

In France we are at the end of that road. Debt we can never repay. Young people who can't afford a home. Our best people leaving. And every few years our cities burn. Nobody voted for this. They voted for one more generous promise, fifty years in a row.

If you're a Republican, share this with the Democrat in your life. Not to win an argument. To start a conversation.

If you're a Democrat, I'm not asking you to switch teams. I'm asking you to look at the pattern. Wherever the state took over, life became unaffordable. Don't fix the failures of government with more government.

Stay American. Ask for less state, not more.

[Bill Angsten @BillAngsten]

Illinois tax burden up $85.6 billion under Pritzker as he enacts 63 tax and fee hikes https://t.co/k8CTOB3Ng9

[Hon. Vickie Paladino @VickieforNYC]

Of course he name drops an obscure Italian-American communist who was against America's participation in World War 2 and was investigated by the FBI for his ties to the international communist party.

Of all the great men and women of Italian descent who've contributed to New York City and the United States, this is the idiot he picks.

He is physically incapable of being anything other than a loathsome propagandist for communism.

As the most prominent Italian-American in city government, please allow me to formally disinvite you from ever mentioning Italian heritage ever again.

And yes, we Italians came here to work, create businesses, dig the subways, build the buildings -- and it was indeed a struggle. A struggle a rich kid like Zohran could never know. But we didn't ask for any handouts. There was no welfare, millions of us came here knowing there was only ourselves, our work, and our community -- and we thrived. We wanted to become Americans, and our people were proud to learn the language and wave the American flag.

And when the time came, millions of Italian-Americans returned to Europe to fight World War 2, my father included. Many of them had to fight their own former countrymen in Mussolini's Italy. And they did exactly that, because they were nothing less than Americans.

Quite the opposite of the current immigrant situation championed by people like Zohran, where we invite lazy and entitled foreigners to loot the treasury without asking anything in return, as they resentfully fly the flags of their own nations -- and could never be counted on to defend America.

My mother was a widow who raised five children on her own, working in a button factory. We didn't take a penny of government assistance. We relied on ourselves. It was hard work, but we did it, and we were grateful. And today I sit on the City Council, representing the very neighborhood I grew up in.

That's what being an Italian-American in New York means. Not the communist propaganda Zohran is pushing here.

It's about hard work, independence, heritage, and most importantly, pride in being an American above all else.

[Andrew Kolvet @AndrewKolvet]

Muslims latch onto far left political causes in the West because they know they can exploit those movements to destroy the nation through mass migration (bring in more Muslims) and mass welfare (bankrupt the country).

El Sayed knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s a Trojan Horse.

[KJofTikTok @TheKJofTikTok]

🔥 Now this is how you field the questiond about the war in Iran. The crowd's response is epic.

GOP Senatorial candidate Justin Murphy's response was pure gold. Senator Cory "Spartacus" Booker's face tells the entire story as Democrats have seen no one come Out swinging like this.

"Mr. President, put your cowboy hat on and get out there and kick some
a$$...and get this done and get this done right"

[Jesse Kelly @JesseKellyDC]

Immigration has become the only issue that matters.

The communist believes this. And he’s right. Whoever wins the immigration battle wins the war.

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

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.