Jeff Goldman

[Brit Hume @brithume]

Quote: “A flying car is what men do when they are free. A wealth tax is what politicians do to the men who built it. One of them needs the other to survive, and it isn't Musk.”

[Hagerty @Hagerty]

We've seen the stunts, but how did they actually do it?

For the latest edition of The Driver's Seat, @HenryCatchpole gets an exclusive look behind the scenes at the car that broke the internet overnight.

Tesla's VP of Vehicle Engineering, Lars Moravy, gives us all the details on the flying, kick-flipping, ceiling-sticking Tesla Roadster.

To learn more, watch the full video here: https://t.co/oIjQsMpyua

Presented by @Mobil1

[MBL @BuschMVP]

WHERE YOU AT BREWERS FANS?? YOU ARE ALL FUCKING SILENT ALL OF A SUDDEN🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😂🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤣🤡😂🤡🤡🤣🤣🤣🤡🤣

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

«The decline of a civilization»

[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.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Lightening table reacting to hand movements

[Jesus is King @AlexKielar]

This is hilarious 🤣🤣🤣

[Baseball is my favorite season @marycarr5]

Hey @MLBONFOX next season's playoffs (if there is a next season), how about mix up the announcers? Its blatantly obvious Joe Davis is rooting for the Dodgers...you shouldn't have one of the team's regular announcers calling the game if he can't be impartial 🤷‍♀️

[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.

[Jeff Goldman @WrigleyFan]

@MLBONFOX Turned sound off during Braves series as well.

[Connor @23cmcpadres]

Joe Davis has probably gotten some undeserved shit during this Postseason but the way he’s talking about the Brewers and the Brewers being up 2-0 is shameful. You can quite literally hear how sad his voice is when he’s talking about the situation. FOX really may need to step in.

[Jeff Goldman @WrigleyFan]

@MLB

[Taylor Murphy @Tay_Murph]

Hey @MLB - wanna get more kids watching baseball?

Maybe start with the commercials.

Watching the playoffs tonight with my kids and here's the rundown:
- Megan Fox selling ED pills in a red bodysuit
- The scariest movie trailer you've ever seen
- Sydney Sweeney in zero clothes promoting betting on sports

Leagues can't figure out why kids don't watch.

You don't need a Nickelodeon game. You're not the Savannah Bananas.

Just show baseball in a way I can leave on in my house.

[Ben Verlander @BenVerlander]

The Brewers are the ultimate OUTLIER

When I was diving in on the game and pitching matchup yesterday I found this. This is a statistic of the average degree of the barrel of the bat at contact point for each team.

Everything to the left is pull side contact point. Everything to the right is opposite field contact point.

29 of the 30 teams are to the pull side.

There’s just one to the opposite field. The Milwaukee Brewers.

This is wild to me. And speaks volumes to their team approach. It means the ball is traveling deeper which has a ripple effect on everything else you’re trying to do as a hitter.

It allows you to recognize off speed for a split second longer. Spit on pitches down and away. Keep pitches fair that you’re normally pulling foul. Foul line to foul line approach.

The team with the best record in all of baseball is the ONLY team doing something. And they’re not even particularly close to any other teams. That’s pretty eye opening.

Also shoutout Twins. Turn and burn, baby.

[92.9 The Game @929TheGame]

. @atlbell929 is SICK AND TIRED of feeling like a visitor in Mercedes-Benz Stadium.

[Jeff Goldman @WrigleyFan]

@TheFalcoholic 28-3 Esque

[Jeff Goldman @WrigleyFan]

@steakshapiro Special teams penalties continue to hurt the team.

[Jeff Goldman @WrigleyFan]

@atlbell929 @AtlantaFalcons Special teams continue to hurt the team

[Catturd ™ @catturd2]

If a President can only serve 8 years, members of Congress should only be allowed to serve 8 years, too.

Also, a 6 year term for Senators is too long, it should be 4.

[Jeff Goldman @WrigleyFan]

@atlbell929 @AtlantaFalcons Special teams are trash. 🚩

[Jeff Goldman @WrigleyFan]

@nikitabier Why are they coming back to X?

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

This forgotten mouse experiment is now more relatable than ever.

[📹 istokp]