“And you’re sure this doesn’t make us sound like pompous arseholes?”
“How about I put an exclamation mark at the end to show that we’re still a bunch of wacky funsters?”
public schools are just a smol bean, with modest goals like "consume $4 billion in taxpayer money", "funneling it through a union to launder it into campaign contributions" and "failing to educate the kids"
I think it's very very mean of @KellyAyotte to pick on them
@foomagemindset Anything supernatural implies acausality. So sure, it shows up in occult writings, but also the miracles and myths of standard religions.
There are two sides to every student loan - The borrower owes for the money they received, while society owes the social status they expected to obtain.
There's about $2T in outstanding student loans, but also ~60M degree holders, each expecting to draw $150k+ (2026 dollars) and have 5+ subordinates. They won't marry or mate or stop advocating increased bureaucracy and immigration until they get their due.
Unless you somehow cancel both sides of this debt bubble, you can't resolve the underlying problem.
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 retroactive tax if passed, 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]: https://t.co/1lbZgnMTG9
There are two sides to every student loan - The borrower owes for the money they received, while society owes the social status they expected to obtain.
There's about $2T in outstanding student loans, but also ~60M degree holders, each expecting to draw $150k+ (2026 dollars) and have 5+ subordinates. They won't marry or mate or stop advocating increased bureaucracy and immigration until they get their due.
Unless you somehow cancel both sides of this debt bubble, you can't resolve the underlying problem.
I’m really sick of the knee jerk responses from people who want to punish student borrowers.
Every other type of debt can be discharged in bankruptcy. Let people take the 10 year hit to their credit—if they can pay the debt, it won’t be discharged or they won’t file.
>"Flock cameras are for catching criminals, don't be paranoid"
>cop gives Flock login to her ICE agent husband
>he uses it to actually track down illegal aliens
>she gets fired for "misuse"
More proof that Flock is for harassing white taxpayers who live in crime-free suburbs