Sully

life’s a bit

[foley (follard) @follard]

I went to Dartmouth. It costs roughly $60,000 a year all in. I now build homes for a living. They cost roughly $350,000 to build.

Both of these numbers are completely insane. And they are insane for the exact same reason.

The moment the government guarantees a loan, the seller stops caring what the buyer can actually afford. College tuition exploded after the federal government started backing student loans with no underwriting and no discharge in bankruptcy. Home prices exploded after Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started buying mortgages and removing risk from lenders.

When a bank knows it will get paid no matter what, it will lend to anyone. When the bank will lend to anyone, the seller raises the price. When the seller raises the price, the buyer just borrows more. Nobody feels the pain until the bill comes due 10 or 30 years later.

Colleges added $200 million rec centers and hired thousands of administrators because students were writing checks with money that didn't feel real. Home sellers listed at $500k because they knew the bank would approve it regardless of whether the buyer could sustain the payment.

I benefited from both systems. My Dartmouth degree opened doors. The homes I build get financed by these same banks. I am not pretending to be above it.

But I look at both industries from the inside and tell you they run on the same engine. A guaranteed loan that disconnects the buyer from the real cost of what they are purchasing. The university and the mortgage lender have the same business model. They are financing tools that happen to have a campus or a front door.

If the government removed the guarantee from the student loans tomorrow, tuition would drop 40% within five years. If Fannie and Freddie disappeared, home prices would correct in the same direction. The prices are essentially fake. They are a reflection of how much debt a bank is willing to issue, not how much the product is intrinsically worth.

I say this as someone who went to an expensive school and builds homes. Both systems are broken in the exact same way and nobody talks about it because too many people profit from the status quo.

[Matt Orfalea @0rf]

The COVID lie that started it all!

[MAZE @mazemoore]

March, 2021. CNN breaks the "news" that the Pfizer vaccine is 100% effective in preventing infection and sickness in 12-15 year old.

It was absolutely not true.

This is the same CNN that wouldn't air Trump's recent speech because of "misinformation."

[Hans Fiene 🦬 @HansFiene]

The biggest lie of the COVID era was “we were all doing the best we could with the information we had.”

[The Babylon Bee @TheBabylonBee]

Science Pleads The 5th
https://t.co/3Ry6yTqSve

[Fox News @FoxNews]

BREAKING: Sen. Rand Paul sends a direct message to Dr. Anthony Fauci during his opening remarks at today's high-stakes Senate hearing:

"President Biden issued you a sweeping pardon extending back to 2014, the same pardon he gave to his son, Hunter. A pardon may protect a person from criminal prosecution, it doesn't rewrite history."

"It is arrogance that destroys trust. It is censorship that destroys trust, and it is the refusal to admit error that destroys trust. That loss of trust may be your most damaging legacy."

[Imp @impostersyndrum]

Our tax system is increasingly placing the entire burden on W2 workers and putting in a million carveouts for boomers and special interest groups. Virtually the only net contributors are high salaried W2 workers

[Leading Report @LeadingReport]

Legacy media including CNN, ABC, NBC, the AP, The Washington Post, and The New York Times have all failed to report on the Fauci diary, which allegedly reveals Anthony Fauci knew COVID-19’s mortality rate was lower than publicly promoted and misled the public with messaging that contradicted internal data.

[Tom Elliott @tomselliott]

Jake, do you think you should have disclosed when writing this that you’d recently hosted Fauci at your house for dinner?

[sonch @soncharm]

Especially in retrospect we can see this random guy intellectually mogged Fauci and whoever that stupid lady was with such common-sense it’s almost painful to watch now

[Tom Elliott @tomselliott]

Dear Diary,

Today I shut down NYC and all California.

Tony

[Dave Smith @ComicDaveSmith]

This sociopathic liar should be in prison for the rest of his life.

[Southport Corridor Chicago @SouthportCor]

Southport Corridor to Welcome New Indoor Golf Club This Fall https://t.co/mzlRwe1VV8 via @southportcor

[Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt]

The communist always must destroy your history. History is what attaches you to something. Memories make a home. The communist attacks your history to unmoor you from your home, so you won’t fight him when he demolishes it and renovates it in his image.

[Robbie Hendricks @robbiehendricks]

Let me tell you something, comrade.

No American thinks we are exceptional because we are richer, stronger and more powerful than everyone else.

We are exceptional because we are American. It is our value system that built wealth, strength, and power.

It was the American values etched into the souls of generations of people in this country that built what we have today.

Those values are something you clearly cannot understand, or you choose not to, because they would require you building something of your own.

Our nation was founded by people who simply wanted a chance to build something for themselves.

It wasn’t about being richer than others. It wasn’t about being more powerful than others. It wasn’t about being stronger than others.

It’s certainly wasn’t built on what you propose, this hideous belief that you or anyone is somehow entitled to what other people built.

That is the antithesis of America. Your ideas would have been laughed out of America 250 years ago. You ran an entire mayoral campaign on seizing assets from others.

The sheer concept of expecting the government to force hard-working people to feed, house, and fund other able-bodied men and women would have been roundly ridiculed.

In fact, that is why people migrated to America. It was about freedom.

They fled oppressive government, they fled the type of tyranny you are promoting. Where their work was not theirs, where the fruits of their labor were taken from them.

They fled here not expecting a handout, but simply hoping for a chance to build something on their own. A chance to bet on themselves.

That dream is still vibrantly alive today for the those that choose to work hard and pursue it.

You, of course, sell that it is not possible. That it is a zero sum game. That the success of one group must therefore be at the expense of another group, which is a disgusting lie disguised as “promoting fairness”.

That is the opposite of our American value system.

In America, we believe in abundance. We believe in hard work. We believe in merit. We believe in earning things. We believe if you learn, work hard, and do your best, doors will open. And they do. Every time.

Those beliefs are what made America exceptional, and that is why America continues to be the greatest country in the history of mankind.

All despite men like you.

[Nick shirley @nickshirleyy]

@NYCMayor @ZohranKMamdani This is a lie. You balanced the budget by borrowing billions from the NY state government which pushed back pension payments, so you literally took money from "the backs of hardworking people."

Don’t get it twisted.

[Ron DeSantis @RonDeSantis]

It’s a perversion of self-government.

Judicially mandating that foreigners are entitled to birth US citizens against the wishes of the people as reflected in law means we cease to be our own rulers.

[Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog]

The actual “birthright” belongs to my children, and the children of all real Americans. They have a birthright to live in a country that resembles the one our ancestors established. And now that birthright, the only true birthright, has been destroyed in favor of the imagined “birthright” of children born to parents who don’t even belong in this country and who have no ancestral or cultural ties to it whatsoever. Total madness. Suicide. Words cannot describe how evil this is.

[Mike P @mikepat711]

You become more fiscally conservative as you get older because you’ve had more time to watch your federal government fail to solve any problems despite taking in trillions of dollars in revenues per year.

You’ve watched the private markets deliver life-changing technologies that bring the entire tide up, all while these hypocrites and fools bark the same nonsense year after year, and somehow cannot manage to deliver anything but massive deficits, finger pointing, and divisive rhetoric.

In this post, Warren transfers nonsense from her brain to her thumbs, and through the magic touch-screen slab to tell you that she’d be able to do something with a few billion more dollars that her and her colleagues haven’t been able to do with a multi-thousand-billion dollar annual budget for years and years.

What is the meaning of her post here? There is no meaning. It is meaningless. The intention? To stir emotions in anyone who isn’t aware of the obvious things I’ve written here. To manipulate and gain the support of sheep.

If you actually think revenue is the bottleneck for government output, you lack basic financial literacy and are being conned by con artists.

[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.