Walshtreet

Chicago-centric, Liberty Loving, Financial Literacy Missionary, Italian Beef Sandwich Expert

[Walshtreet @TomW1365]

@Investanswers DCA works well with a volatile company. Glad I have some dry powder hut my Roth 401k 2x a month. The climb to 500 shares continues!

[Stand With Crypto🛡️ @standwithcrypto]

Today on Capitol Hill, we're delivering a clear message to the Senate.

Stand With Crypto brought 20 founders, developers, and Chapter Presidents to Washington for a full day of meetings and to hand-deliver our new Key Vote Alert Zine to all 100 Senators.

The message is on the page and in the room: the voters want Clarity.

[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.

[Walshtreet @TomW1365]

@DogWalkBarstool Chief!

[The Rabbit Hole @TheRabbitHole]

https://t.co/HAwXsH7QLA

[Walshtreet @TomW1365]

If CA/IL/NY politicians understood simple economics and the laffer curve, the inevitable destruction could be prevented.

[InvestAnswers @Investanswers]

And they're off! Billionaires escaping Alcatraz aka CA —Peter Thiel just signaled he's already in Miami.
His networth equates to 150,000 taxpayers in Cali... just one guy. Not to mention his staff, Co's he funds, their staff and taxes. Well done @RoKhanna cc: @chamath @DavidSacks
#CaliforniaExodus #WealthTax #TechMigration

[Walshtreet @TomW1365]

@Giannis_An34 Walk on from Athens, Greece!

[Austin Berg @Austin__Berg]

WATCH: Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson confirms his “head tax” proposal does not apply to workers who spend <50% of workdays in the city.

This clip raises three major problems with Johnson’s head tax ⬇️

🚩 Punishing back-to-office: This will uniquely penalize in-office work at a time when downtown is still experiencing record-high vacancy rates.

🚩 This won’t raise $100M: It’s clear from their answers here that the mayor and Budget Director Annette Guzman did not take into account remote work when creating the $100M revenue estimate.

🚩 Punishing blue-collar work: A restaurant with 100 employees clearing $8M a year gets hit with a huge head-tax bill, while a law firm with 100 employees (majority remote) clearing $80M does not.

[Flappr @flapprdotnet]

A reminder of the world you lived in just 5 years ago . . .

Lori Lightfoot introduced us to the "Rona Destroyer"

[Walshtreet @TomW1365]

@SarahSpain Sarah…. In the last 15 years, you went from a fun, vivacious sports fanatic that Chicago fans enjoyed to the annoying girl who cried wolf at every predictable opportunity.

[Solana @solana]

The tokenization race is on.

Meet @Securitize — powering institutional-grade tokenized funds from BlackRock, Apollo, and VanEck on Solana 🪙

[Walshtreet @TomW1365]

@barstoolchicago @BlueIslandBC

[Walshtreet @TomW1365]

@barstoolchicago Home of Gary Sinice &amp; BIBCO. Blue Island!

[Tesla @Tesla]

The future will be streamed live

10/10, 7pm PT https://t.co/YJEjZIYoTA

[Walshtreet @TomW1365]

Bear Down!

https://t.co/oAlA1Mm1m8

[Morgan J. Freeman @mjfree]

THIS WINS THE DAY!!!! https://t.co/Lk2PJeFByd

[Walshtreet @TomW1365]

@EddieBarstool I like most of 670 Score personalities. No one on Chicago sports radio is more obnoxious about his beliefs than egotistical swellhead Dan Bernstein. #NailsOnChalkboard

[Farzad 🇺🇸 🇮🇷 @farzyness]

A big problem for Democrats in 2024 is that they’ve painted Trump as literal evil incarnate.

In response, Trump is going on a ton of long-form podcasts where a lot of independents are watching and listening to Trump speak - many of them for the first time - and are able to form an opinion based on what they see first hand.

This is a stark contrast to how a lot of us have absorbed information in the past, which is whatever Legacy Media has shoved down our throats. It is not secret that Legacy Media, by and large, has a left-leaning bias.

This will - without a doubt - win voters that are unhappy with the system (which is A LOT of people - 19% of the country think Congress is doing a good job, 50% of the country identifies as Independent).

Trump’s entire position since the beginning is being the hammer to whatever we’ve built thus far, which has been very ineffective for many to put it mildly. His ability to be an effective hammer is still an open question.

However, by default, if Kamala doesn’t start doing long-form interviews or podcasts where Independents are able to gauge, first hand, her policy and who she is as a person, she will lose, and likely lose by a lot.

Anecdotally - I have many folks within my circle that I consider to be independent voters. As a whole, my circle leans left. None of them are enthusiastic about Kamala, and all of them have been softer on Trump vs 2020.

This is obviously in stark contrast to many polls, so my very small sample could be totally wrong.

But just like 2016, I think polls are missing a very significant shift in the general public. I think this shift is being driven by many choosing to forgo Legacy Media as their primary source of information, and instead absorbing information from more independent voices.

A lot of these voices, at least from what I’ve noticed, are questioning the system much more often, much more loudly, and much more confidently.

I think how COVID was handled, paired with Government’s heavy-handed approach to silence speech that was challenging the ‘true’ narrative - which by the way is now proven to be unquestionable true (Twitter Files, Zuck’s letter)… which is a literal obstruction of the First Amendment - have many convinced that whatever we’ve got going on now ain’t working.

In short - the whole ‘Trump is an evil dictator’ and ‘Kamala is an evil communist’ rhetoric is shallow and does nothing.

Instead, in depth discussions that reveals the individuals character, paired with policy, will win the day.

Only podcasts can do this, and only one candidate has taken this on.

Let me know what you think.

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr @RobertKennedyJr]

Kamala Harris: "He [Musk] has lost his privileges."
Can someone please explain to her that freedom of speech is a RIGHT, not a "privilege"?

Kamala Harris: "There has to be a responsibility placed on these social media sites to understand their power."
Translation: "If they don't police content to conform to government-approved narratives, they will be shut down."

[Collin Rugg @CollinRugg]

BREAKING: Family members of the 13 service members who died in the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal absolutely demolish Kamala Harris.

The videos were shared by Trump on X in response to Kamala’s moral outrage over the Arlington “incident.”

The family members blamed Harris for the de*th’s of their children and said they invited Trump to the ceremony.

“Kamala, your statement is nothing more than a political spin to help you look better in your presidential campaign against Donald Trump.”

“You have never walked a single day in our shoes. Our kids were m*rdered because of your administration, and you are partly to blame for that as well.”

“What happened at Arlington was President Trump was invited by those families who have their soldiers buried at Arlington.”