James Constas

Personal account. Opinions are my own. RTs do not equal endorsements. Proud to be an American.

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

My piece on Colorado's property tax crisis is available now on the Rocky Mountain Voice @TheRMVoice. As the legislature heads into a new special session, hold your representatives accountable to real change.

https://t.co/3iw6xb23lV

#copolitics #coleg #cogov #9News

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

Yep. The very foundations of Socialism are false and despite every time it fails, which it inevitably does, it is always blamed on "the wrong guy" or they didn't go left enough. Engels and Marx appears as ungrateful children who rebelled against parents who gave them everything.

[Handre @Handre]

Marx lived his entire adult life as a dependent. The capitalist system funded his "research" through Engels, whose family wealth came from textile factories. The irony cuts deep: capitalism's profits subsidized its most famous critic.

Marx never held a real job. Never met payroll. Never risked capital or faced bankruptcy. He spent decades theorizing about labor value while avoiding actual labor. His insights into production came from library books, not factory floors.

The parasitic intellectual tradition he spawned continues today. Academic Marxists collect taxpayer-funded salaries while denouncing the market system that creates the wealth they consume.

It's time to get rid of these people.

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

@dcsheriff Thank you. Kids riding diffficult to see e-bikes are dangerous. I’ve almost hit a few because they whip around corners in the wrong lane. Trust me, they would have lost if they hit my truck head on. Go to BLM land and ride there. Whatever happened to actually pedaling a bike?

[John Stossel @JohnStossel]

For years, Europe’s economy was about the size of America’s. Not today.

Today, the U.S. is 50% RICHER--despite the EU having 100 million MORE people.

What changed?

[Independence Institute @i2idotorg]

What exactly is TABOR? Why does it matter? And why is it constantly under attack?

Introducing TABOR Talk, a new series from the Independence Institute that breaks down Colorado's Taxpayer's Bill of Rights in plain English. From ballot measures and tax increases to refunds and government spending, TABOR Talk gives you the facts behind one of the most important protections for Colorado taxpayers.

In the first episode, we take a closer look at SB 135 and what it could mean for TABOR refunds and voter control.

Watch now: https://t.co/tmtWzSZNed #thinkfreedom #copolitics #TABOR

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

We’re all in this together, billionaires and all. Jealous and greedy ideology destroys municipal budgets.

[Yogi @Houseofyogi]

Chicago lost the Bears this week. A team that's been in the city since 1921.

They didn't lose them to a bigger market or a better deal. The Bears decided they'd rather be a tenant in Indiana than deal with Illinois for one more year.

Think about how badly you have to run a place for that to be the smart move.

They lost them for two reasons.

The people running Illinois would rather villainize a builder than keep one. And they're bad at their jobs.

In 2021 the Bears spent $197M on the old Arlington Park racetrack.

Before they could break ground, Cook County valued the empty lot at $192M (Bears said $60M). They were salivating at the chance to extort a building that didn't even exist yet.

That fight dragged on for years.

The Bears were ready to put $2B into the stadium. All they wanted was a promise the county wouldn't reassess them into oblivion, plus $855M for infrastructure everyone uses. Roads, transit, utilities. A $3B project, two thirds of it private money pouring into Illinois.

Springfield had since 2021 to get this done. They dragged it to the final night of session, passed it through the Senate at 3:39AM, and the House went home without voting.

So now it's all gone.

The funniest part? This started because Cook County tried to grab the tax early. They knew a built stadium would pay $53M a year. Now they get under $4M on a vacant lot. No jobs, no buildout, no new anything.

Congrats on fighting for scraps and losing the whole prize.

Pritzker: they're "an $8.5B valued business" that doesn't need propping up.

But be smart for a second. Almost every NFL city throws in public money for a stadium. Not charity. The return is real. Tourism, hotels, restaurants, jobs, game days, property tax on a huge development. The math works.

Indiana did the math. While Illinois sat on it for years, Indiana passed a bill in months, put up $1B, and took the team.

And the Bears took a worse deal to get there. In Illinois they were going to own their stadium. In Indiana they rent it from the state. A team that wanted to build its own home gave up ownership just to escape Chicago.

Nobody won but Indiana. The Bears lost their stadium. Illinois lost the team, the $2B, and $53M a year in taxes.

Pritzker after they left: "I wasn't willing to give up billions of dollars of taxpayer money to give it to a billionaire-owned family or team."

There it is. "Billionaire-owned."

That's how Democrats talk about any business right before they run it out of town. Call them a billionaire, act like you're saving working families, take a victory lap while the tax base drives across the state line.

Meanwhile they're running the whole state into the ground. And you already know how this ends. You're living in it.

Pensions are $143B in the hole, worst in the country and not close. You pay $6,285 a year in property taxes, double the $2,969 national average, for a city that's $1.15B in the red. The mayor called its finances "the point of no return."

When you run things this badly, you sell what's left.

They leased the parking meters for 75 years to Morgan Stanley and a sovereign wealth fund in Abu Dhabi. Took $1.15B and burned through it in two years. The investors already made it all back, with 58 years left to collect.

Sold the Skyway. Sold the downtown garages. Every asset that made money, gone for one check.

But a fixed property tax rate for a team that's been here 106 years? That's "propping up billionaires."

Companies are leaving. Boeing for Virginia. Caterpillar for Texas. Citadel for Miami. In 2023 alone Illinois lost 56,000 people and $6B in income to other states. The ones who left earned a third more than the ones who moved in.

Indiana didn't outbid anyone. AAA credit, 16 years straight. A $676M surplus. Fourth-lowest debt per person in the country. They just weren't a disaster.

Illinois could have collected $53M a year. It chose zero. Ignore all the bad management but make sure to stick it to those evil, pesky billionaires.

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

@PeterDClack My grandfather, a nuclear physicist who worked on the Nautilus submarine and at the Jet Propulsion Lab, told me about Milankovich Cycles decades ago. Truth is truth even if it gets covered up from time to time.

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

@KirkmeyerforGov @MandyConnell And "Mostly Harmless" 😂

After 22 years of blue dominance, normal is what Colorado needs.

Graphics credit @schotts

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

I'm reading the book "1929" by Andrew Ross Sorkin, which covers the role of market speculation, monetary policy, tariffs, and other factors in precipitating the Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. Very insightful post that covers this dark time in American history

[Handre @Handre]

The 1920-21 depression was the sharpest economic contraction in American history, yet you've probably never heard of it. Industrial production collapsed 32%. Unemployment spiked from 4% to 12% in twelve months. By every measure, this downturn dwarfed the initial shock of 1929.

President Warren Harding faced enormous pressure to "do something." Labor leaders demanded public works programs. Businessmen begged for bailouts and trade protection. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon advised Harding to slash government spending and let wages fall. Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover (yes, that Hoover) pushed for massive federal intervention.

Harding chose Mellon. The federal budget dropped from $6.4 billion to $3.2 billion in two years. No stimulus packages. No bailouts. No alphabet soup of new agencies. Government employment fell 40%. When you let markets clear, they clear fast.

The recovery started in July 1921. By 1923, unemployment had dropped to 2.4% and industrial production reached new highs. The entire episode lasted eighteen months from peak to full recovery. Compare that to Japan's lost decade of intervention, or the European debt crisis that dragged on for years, or our own jobless recovery after 2008.

Most economics textbooks omit this episode because liquidating malinvestments and allowing price adjustments works exactly as free market theory predicts: a fact that destroys the Keynesian narrative that government must spend its way out of recessions. Politicians today claim they learned the lessons of the 1930s, but they studiously ignore the more important lesson of 1921.

[Handre @Handre]

The Federal Reserve creates $4 trillion in new money, yet your grocery bill barely budges while Nvidia stock doubles in six months. Welcome to the most insidious form of inflation: when newly printed dollars bypass consumer prices and flow directly into financial assets.

You won't see this wealth transfer reflected in the Consumer Price Index. The CPI measures bread and gasoline, not Bitcoin and Berkshire Hathaway. Meanwhile, the Fed's money printing operation sends fresh liquidity straight to primary dealers, who park those dollars in stocks, bonds, and real estate. Asset owners get richer. Wage earners watch their purchasing power erode in real terms, even as official inflation statistics claim everything is fine.

This creates a vicious feedback loop that sound money advocates have warned about for decades. Cheap credit inflates asset bubbles, which the Fed then feels compelled to support with even more money printing. Each cycle makes the wealth gap wider. The Tesla shareholder benefits from artificially suppressed interest rates. The school teacher saving in a checking account gets destroyed by financial repression.

The establishment calls this "quantitative easing" and pretends it's different from old-fashioned money printing. Expanding the money supply faster than real economic growth means that new money has to go somewhere. Since 2008, it has systematically flowed into assets that wealthy people own rather than goods that working people buy.

Your 401(k) might look healthy, but you're watching monetary debasement in real time. The stock market is booming because dollars are dramatically less scarce, not because companies are dramatically more productive.

If you can, buy stocks, bitcoin, property, or gold. This makes you a beneficiary of this phenominon, not a victim.

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

@schotts Well said. This law, like other gun control laws, is unlikely to stop anyone suffering from untreated mental illness and homicidal motivations from stealing a gun or buying one on the street. It fails to address the root causes of violence.

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

@Avabelly__ Yes. Overreacting. Everyone on my street puts out garbage cans out the evening before pickup day. It’s not a big deal.

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

The government cannot be both an owner and regulator of companies. The roles are inherently conflicted and given today’s political culture there’s no way I want government owning AI firms.

Stay in your lane, big government. Your first job is to protect our rights.

#copolitics

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

I will soon be introducing a bill to give the public a 50% ownership stake in the largest AI companies in America.

This would guarantee that the trillions created by AI are used to improve the lives of all of us — and block oligarch decisions that harm the American people.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

The Milankovitch orbital cycles are the primary force guiding the Earth's ice age climate patterns.

Orbital mechanics have long dominated climate dynamics, eclipsing the CO₂ narrative. The shifts from glacial to warm interglacial periods have been carefully studied for hundreds of years. These aren't just random fluctuations; they are a consequence of Earth’s positioning in space relative to the sun.

These three orbital anomalies are 'eccentricity' (orbital shape), 'obliquity' (Earth's tilt) and 'precession' (a planetary wobble). Their motions dictate the distribution of solar insolation flux (the angle of sunlight hitting the Earth), particularly at 65°N. CO₂ is at best a fainter secondary feedback mechanism, not the primary driver.

The oceans are warmed by natural variability - primarily from the sun, but also the positioning of landforms, the orbital anomalies, oceanic currents, water vapor, the prevailing winds, and endless storms, which are the drivers of atmospheric dynamics.

Oceans contain nearly 86% of the planet's surface carbon pool, while the atmosphere holds a mere 2%. When viewing the global carbon budget through this prism, the atmosphere is more like a carbon desert.

Once orbital cycles trigger initial warming, and oceans release absorbed CO₂ centuries later, there is an 800 to 1,100-year time lag. This is documented as a significant time gap in Vostok and EPICA ice cores.

It's difficult to accept that rising CO₂ could be the primary source of warming, given these other factors. This is further clouded by a 'smoothing' distortion called the Firn Gap. CO₂ isn't trapped instantly in past ice conditions; it circulates in the 'firn' (which is unconsolidated snow) for decades or even centuries before the ice seals it shut.

Because of this, ice cores average out centuries of data into a single data point.

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

@schotts @pweiser @SenatorBennet I’d like to know what his vision for Colorado is regardless of who’s in the White House.

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

@VigilantFox The world is a dynamic place that defies prediction. AI represents a threat to work and human dignity. On the other hand, the cost of AI is proving a barrier.

https://t.co/twDnsre9Ka

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

And yet our utility bills continue to rise.

#copolitics #Colorado #9News #HeyNext

[The Colorado Sun @ColoradoSun]

Colorado in top pack for renewable energy, with surprising competition
https://t.co/sFlh6v3hHG

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

Change. Vote for it.

#copolitics

[Jeff Hunt @jeffhunt]

Denver, completely controlled by Democrats, is America's emptiest city, with the highest office vacancy rate of any major city.

The Libs hatred of successful people is killing our cities.

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

@Rossputin @victormarx @KOAColorado Well said, Ross. Those seeking public service have an obligation to participate in debates so the public can assess for themselves if they are qualified. No more campaigning from the basement.

[Peter Clack @PeterDClack]

Not 1°C of warming has been reduced. Not one life was saved. Not 1 ppm of CO₂ has been avoided.

The total climate price tag by 2050 will be $275 trillion—amounting to $9.2 trillion every single year (McKinsey, 2022). That staggering total is roughly 2.5 times the entire annual GDP of the world.

Not one life has been saved from a changing climate that could have been better protected by leaving cheap, reliable, traditional energy in place. This is the ultimate belief gap, and it's staggering.

While the UN chased a global wealth redistribution bonanza, the cost to our future has been colossal. Imagine a world we could have built if that capital hadn't been poured into a failed ideology. The UN wealth redistribution scheme didn't save the planet, it funded a new, fabulously wealthy, bureaucratic class.

Reality is finally calling in the debt.

[James Constas @JamesConstas]

@TheRightAOC @DenverChannel It’s telling how many (all) climate alarmists have deleted their tweets shaming true scientists claiming the “science is settled” as they pushed for more taxpayer monies going to climate projects of questionable value.