Below is my column in the California Post and New York Post on Rep. Ro Khanna confirming that the Billionaire Tax is really not a Billionaire Tax, but rather should be used to target the wealth of others. It is the latest manifestation of the class warfare being unleashed before the midterm elections.
Here is the column:
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) just moved to outbid his Democratic colleagues in the presidential auction. With the radical left sweeping away establishment figures in favor of socialists, various prospective presidential candidates are offering up key institutions in their effort to appease the mob.
The Supreme Court has been the starting bid. Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg and Josh Shapiro have yielded to the mob and embraced court packing.
Khanna is not to be outdone. After his disastrous campaigning for Graham Platner, Khanna is returning to a sure winner: Class warfare.
Last week, Khanna confirmed that the “billionaire tax” is just the start and that they will go on to target the wealth of other citizens as an untapped resource of new revenue.
For years, some of us have warned that the billionaire tax was a ruse. Sponsors like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Khanna were using billionaires as an easy political target, but they were unlikely to stop there.
The challenge is to get the tax through the courts, which is why it is so essential to pack the court. Warren notably was an early advocate of both changes.
I discuss the tax in my book “Rage and the Republic” as an example of the “eat-the-rich” politics used by demagogues from ancient Athens to the French Revolution. Politicians seek to divide a population into “haves” and “have-nots” with the promise that citizens could have it all if only they are given back power.
Warren tried to use the tax to restart her moribund 2020 presidential campaign. During one debate, she dramatically told the rich she was coming after “your Rembrandts, your stock portfolio, your diamonds and your yachts.” She thrilled the crowd by greedily rubbing her hands together after saying she would take some of the wealth of fellow candidate John Delaney, a self-made millionaire.
The problem is that a federal billionaire tax (which is distinct from California’s billionaire tax that will be on the upcoming state ballot) is, in my view, completely unconstitutional. The federal government secured the right to tax individuals in 1913, but the 16th Amendment only approved income taxes.
As made clear by Warren, Democrats want to tax people for the things that they bought after paying their taxes from homes to art to boats.
If they can pack the Court and greenlight a billionaire tax, there would be no limit to then moving the threshold wealth level downward. Once that Rubicon is crossed, Democrats would suddenly be able to tax trillions in the property and possessions of citizens.
That is precisely what Khanna finally admitted last week in a Substack post, arguing that “the tax should not stop at billionaires; it must reach centimillionaires. The tax has to reach all fortunes $50 million and up.”
The wealth tax is the closest this country has come to an open redistribution-of-wealth effort, a core agenda item for the rising socialist movement.
Other countries such as France tried wealth taxes with disastrous results. Not only did it fail to generate the expected revenue (the wealth left the country en masse), but it also had to be rescinded. In Norway, the government kept reducing the level of targeted assets to six-figure thresholds.
The national tax is meant to address the growing disaster in California, which has reportedly lost trillions as the wealthy flee the high-tax state. Khanna and other Democrats hope to give the wealth nowhere to flee by taking this “hunt-the-rich” effort national.
In making this pitch, Khanna is trying to achieve the political stunt of the century. Khanna is reportedly worth roughly half a billion dollars thanks to his wife’s inheritance. He is not alone among the super wealthy Democrats declaring themselves the champions of the proletariat.
After all, there’s Illinois Gov. Jay Robert “JB” Pritzker, who also inherited his fortune. In a July interview with CNN, Pritzker virtually begged the mob that he is a different kind of billionaire, pointing at Trump billionaires as the rightful targets (not him with $4.3 billion).
Others found themselves on the wrong side of the mob.
Rep. Dan Goldman, who inherited a massive fortune of almost $300 million as a trust baby, unwisely promised to help subsidize his congressional reelection campaign from his family fortune. Goldman fell flat with the socialist and increasingly antisemitic base — and was crushed by over 30 points.
Khanna hopes to stay ahead of that mob by leading it to the homes of other wealthy citizens.
As for California, the state is already showing how class warfare does not quite work if the upper classes simply leave with their wealth, businesses and jobs.
The state is facing a crippling debt of billions as its tax base contracts. Rather than reducing spending and waste, California Democrats and unions are pushing for unprecedented new taxes despite the exodus to low-tax states such as Florida and Texas.
It is an example of economic Darwinism, where citizens who are slow to flee are being fleeced by some of the highest taxes, gas prices and the cost of living in the nation.
At the same time, core services from education to public safety remain subpar at a premium price.
In the meantime, the far left is already moving even further and faster than establishment candidates like Khanna.
The Democratic Socialists have floated possible additions to their platform, including allowing Congress not just to pack the Court but also to pick Supreme Court justices. There is also a call for the elimination of the Senate, the defunding defense and immigration programs, open borders and allowing noncitizens to vote.
Those are the very type of measures that the Jacobins used in France to create “direct” democratic powers.
The Framers rejected such measures as offering little more than a “mobocracy.” It was the reason that our country became the oldest and most prosperous republic in history while France became “the Terror.”
Khanna, Pritzker and others may hope that they can still harness the power of the mob. However, history is not on their side.
For all of their promises of radical changes to our constitutional system and wealth taxes, these establishment figures will be devoured in the very class warfare that they seek to unleash.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times bestselling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
No, it’s not. It’s based on stopping cruelty and unfairness that comes out of business owners/managers.
Oy, it’s just so cruel to give people a job so they can earn a living. Oy it’s so unfair that investors and employees ate rewarded. Goodness knows the only solution is to kill the job and wealth creators and steal whatever they have.
Here is a prime example of how socialism is based on hatred, envy, and theft. Free markets have made even the poorest Americans wealthier than most of the world. Yet this deluded leftist says that creating jobs, allowing employees the ability to earn a living to support their families, and giving investors a return for their risk taking, is “cruel” and “unfair.” I could not have thought of a better illustration of the moral bankruptcy of socialism if I had tried.
stop pretending you have a job anon.
I am most gratified to report that SpaceX stock continues its downward spiral into oblivion.
It has spiraled downward every day since the IPO to close today at $136.08, just over one dollar above the IPO price of 135.00, and down 40% from its high.
Tomorrow should see this worthless stock drop below the IPO price, thus ensuring that everyone stupid enough to have bought and held this stock will have lost money.
This IPO was a scam from the get go, and a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money.
My only wish is that the stock falls low enough so that the loans which Musk has taken out using his holdings as collateral become payable because the value of the stock falls below the loan amount.
Oh happy day !!!!
I am most gratified to report that . . . a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money.
Par for the course for a liberal. You sound like a drag.
Some stocks are a pyramid scheme.
When leftists are not hoping others get killed, or celebrating the murder or untimely death of others, they’re wishing poverty on others.
So how much have you lost ???
ANON MORON has $25 in savings!
Forgot to add that Musk’s net worth plummeted by $520 billion in the month since the IPO.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer fellow.
How does that improve your life, other than being happy about someone else losing money? That extra money then does not get pumped into the economy through business loans.
Socialism is based on theft and envy. There is nothing virtuous about it. It is based only on vice.
Socialism is based on theft and envy
And hatred.
I am more of a capitalist than you and most of the wingnuts that infest this blog.
The last job I had where I worked for a wage was the summer after my senior year in high school 56 years ago. After college I ran my own business with my wife. My son likewise runs his own business.
I am actively involved in the stock market on a daily basis, and like many others in my position I recognized the SpaceX IPO as an overvalued scam.
Anyone stupid enough to fall for Musk’s scam of an IPO will get what they deserve.
I invite you to copy/paste the following question into Google:
why is spacex ipo overvalued
You lost all credibility with the words “wingnuts” and “infest.” After that, nothing you said is credible.
I have no interest in what you believe about my credibility.
Just Google the question that I suggested.
See for yourself that I know what I am talking about.
My guess is that you thought you were going to make a killing, got greedy, and lost your money and your pride and your stance among family and friends. You reek of sour grapes, not savory wine.
Ahhhh!!
So you really do understand that the whole thing is a scam, and you really do realize and admit that a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money !!!!
Fortunately I am not one of them.
That criticism wasn’t quite the insult you thought it would be, is it now !!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAAHHA
What a moron.
naw, your hatred and vitriol is so over the top that you either didn’t come out where you thought you would or you lost someone else’s money. The nonny day-trader, are you? Something doesn’t ring true here.
You are not credible when you claim to be a capitalist and working for minimum wage and all the other garbage you spewed. If your only point was about a google search, then you wouldn’t have had to say all the other garbage. You didn’t say all that other garbage for no reason. So again you lied when you said you have no interest in whether people find you credible. Thus adding to your lack of credibility.
I think you are hallucinating.
I never said anything about working for minimum wage.
You have probably confirmed what I said by doing the Google search that I suggested.
You simply don’t like the fact that what I said is absolutely correct as confirmed by the information you found.
And therefore in your primitive reptilian mind you decide to label all this information as “garbage” rather than accept the reality that you confirmed with your own eyes, thus proving that you are indeed a wingnut.
AI Overview
SpaceX is widely viewed as overvalued because its massive multitrillion-dollar market cap relies on “perfect execution” of experimental technology and highly volatile artificial intelligence (AI) investments, rather than current earnings.
And so your point is . . . that you celebrate other people losing money? Typical leftist. First, the mere possibility of it being overvalued does not mean it for sure is. Second, if it turns out to be overvalued, then that’s bad for the economy because many people will lose money, which they then can’t spend to improve their lives and those of the people from whom they purchased goods and services. And you celebrate that? You are “most gratified” by that, and say, “oh, happy day”?
You prove my point: leftists are mentally-deranged monsters. Only a mentally-deranged monster would celebrate badness. You’re pathetic.
You obviously have absolutely no understanding of capitalism or economics.
In capitalism, winners will win and losers will lose. And that is what makes economies prosper. The winners win and the losers are thrown out like the chaff from wheat.
And losers who DESERVE to lose, such as scam artists like Elon Musk, will always lose. That is the essential element of capitalism. Losers must lose, and winners must win. There has to be ruthless elimination of losers.
But you seem to think that we should take pity on losers and make them feel better by saying that they really didn’t deserve to lose, and they didn’t really deserve to lose the opportunity to improve their lives. YES, they do deserve to lose. They are losers. When you coddle losers you are engaging in SOCIALISM.
And you make the utterly absurd assertion that if people lose money, then that is BAD for the economy because people will be deprived of something, and be unable to improve their lives.
What you are describing is SOCIALISM, where you think people should be somehow protected from losing.
ABSOLUTE INSANITY !!!!
People who make bad decisions lose money for sure, but that is in no way bad for the economy. The money is lost to individuals but NOT lost to the market or the economy. The money is simply redistributed from the losers to the winners who will make better use of it, and therefore BENEFIT the economy.
Anything otherwise, in the nature of protecting losers as you seem to suggest, is SOCIALISM.
If you believe that losers should be protected from losing then you are a SOCIALIST, plain and simple.
Google will give the popular opinion.
And after it comes back, Elon Musk will be the world’s first multi-trillionaire.
You’ll be back to comment then, right?
Why are you so invested in the success of Elon Musk ???
Rhetorical question, obviously
I know perfectly well why you are so eager to defend him.
Like you, he is a member of the MAGA cult.
And he is a MAGA cultist because he is a scammer and a grifter just like Trump.
Birds of a feather…as they say.
It is incredibly refreshing to listen to true intellectuals like Justices Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett speak extemporaneously as public speakers especially under the watchful eyes of Americans.
Centimillionaires like Ro Khanna and his “progressive” left wing comrades, if given the chance, will do to Americans and Supreme Court Judges as Fidel & Raul Castro did to the people of Cuba and their Judiciary. Fidel Castro’s net worth upon his death was reported by Forbes to be around $900 Million. His brother Raul is not far behind.
Until Americans feel the machetes of “progressives” (aka Communists) on their necks, they will continue to act like sheeple. Communism appears when people cease to think about matters deeply.
‘Stovie, you come here everyday wanting Likes by linking others’ stuff. Counting your research into these videos, articles, and books, in addition to your lengthy posts, how much time do you spend on your stated medical career” Just curious.
Censored but it’s coercion. It worked.
Perfect!!
Forest and Trees – look at the appropriate context: Ro Kahn’s statement was clear and direct:
“Take from others, and in return, what you took from others will be given to you”. What many fail to discern is this looting is actually being practiced on THEM.
Practical action form: “after I’ve extracted my 98% of that looting by giving it to my friends and family as “service fees” and assuring MY investments in MY ASSETS providing housing[property], welfare, and medical fees are supplemented accordingly”
RoKie is in Congress. Congress has power to tax for only debt, defense, and “general Welfare,” which is “all” “well” “proceed.” Social Security and Medicare address only 18.7% of the population, while the balance of “benefits” and “entitlements” funds even lesser percentages. The communist American welfare state payouts do not fund debt, defense, or “general Welfare” and are irrefutably unconstitutional. They are unconstitutional communism.
If Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians want to run against Social Security and Medicare as unconstitutional communism in 2026 and 2028, then be my guest!
They don’t need to run against those communist confiscation and redistribution programs; the judicial branch must decide they are utterly unconstitutional per Article 1, Section 8.
The Supreme Court held that Social Security was constitutional in Helvering v Davis (1937).
MISCHIEFS OF FACTION
The Founders actively sought to prevent a “tyranny of the majority” by intentionally designing a constitutional republic rather than a pure democracy. They feared that unrestrained majority rule would allow emotional mobs to oppress minority factions and subvert individual liberties.
To counteract this, they built several checks and balances into the government structure:
The Federalist Papers: In Federalist No. 10, James Madison specifically argued that a representative republic is superior to a direct democracy for controlling the “mischiefs of faction.”
The Electoral College: They established this system to ensure that smaller, less-populated states would not be completely governed by the will of the most heavily populated regions.
Bicameral Legislature: Splitting Congress into the House of Representatives (proportional to population) and the Senate (equal representation for every state) ensures that legislation requires broad, consensus-based support across different regions.
Separation of Powers & The Judiciary: By creating independent judicial and executive branches alongside a strict Constitution, they ensured that fundamental rights could not be easily overturned by a simple majority vote.
I trust the republic and the government of the American Founders in the form prescribed in their original Constitution and Bill of Rights, 1789.
The American Founders denied that Ro Khanna “…may be admitted to become a citizen thereof…” in their Naturalization Acts.
The Founders established the United States of America, not the “fundamentally transformed” United States of MexAfricAsiArabia.
“In Allah We Trust” (or is that Ishvara?).
I think not.
Here is how socialism works, Two workers work in a factory making widgets and getting paid $1 dollar a piece. Worker A makes 600 acceptable widgets a day, lives well buys a house and car and saves. Worker B makes 100 acceptable widgets a day and spends that renting and otherwise foolishly while never saving.
A socialist comes in and tells worker B this is unfair, $100 a day is not a living wage. Socialism is accepted and each worker now gets $350 a day. Worker A says why should I make all those widgets if I get the same as worker by and now only make 100 widgets a day. Worker B says it doesn’t matter how many widgets I make or the quality I get $350 dollars a day no matter what, so he make sloppy widgets of that now only 50 are acceptable. The company now loses money and closes. Now neither has any money. The stores lose money, the landlord loses money, the bank loses money and has to foreclose on the house and the economy declines and wealth is destroyed. It ends in equal poverty for all.
See Venezuela, once the richest nation in South America, then socialism was adopted and now the people are poor and the country can barely feed itself. Why? Because there is no incentive to work.
Venezuela, once the richest country in South America, is now considered one of the poorest major economies in the region, with a GDP that has fallen significantly since the turn of the 21st century. As of 2026, it ranks 74th in nominal GDP and 76th in GDP per capita globally, reflecting a dramatic economic decline.
• From a major oil power to a collapsed economy, the country’s history is marked by fuel prices and political decisions along the way
• Venezuela’s economic contraction is unprecedented in the world without a war as a cause, far surpassing even the Great Depression
• Although it is a closed market, ties with the rest of the region persist, with trade links to neighboring countries and a massive diaspora spread across the continent
This widget fable belongs in a children’s book, not a serious economic debate. Nobody is proposing state-mandated flat wages where productive workers get penalized. Asking billionaires to close their tax loopholes isn’t ‘socialism’—it’s standard fiscal policy.
If high taxes and social safety nets automatically caused ‘equal poverty,’ then Denmark, Norway, and Sweden would be economic dead zones. Instead, they beat the U.S. in global upward social mobility rankings while maintaining roaring free markets.
Also, using Venezuela’s hyper-reliance on a single oil commodity to argue against a marginal tax on fortunes over $50 million is totally illiterate. California relies heavily on a progressive tax structure, and the state just posted a $4.5 billion budget surplus backed by a booming $4.3 trillion economy. Stop hiding behind fake factory stories and look at the actual data.
HA! Georgie lifted what he needed from AI to create his own widget fable. Unfortunately, he left off AI’s next sentences:
“Governor Gavin Newsom cut $16 billion in spending and delayed another $3 billion in funding for various services to address California’s budget deficit and ultimately achieve a surplus.”
Somehow, X fails to COMPREHEND, in plain terms, that NEwsom CUT $16 billion for things Californians wanted or needed, the DELAYED another $3 billion scheduled for future “various services” to Californians, to come up with a $4 billion “surplus.”
Wow, go to the head of the class, X!
That free enterprise factory is private property, and only the owner has the power to “claim and exercise” dominion, that is, to design, engineer, manufacture, and market his product, to hire, fire, pay, and direct his employees, and to deny unions any presence on his property, etc.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
“The theory of Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”
– Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
___________________________________________
“[Private property is] that dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in exclusion of every other individual.”
– James Madison
____________________
5th Amendment
No person shall be…deprived of…property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Your regular reminder that Trump has personal financial ties with nearly 30 different business ventures with foreign counterparts and has recently accepted a $2 million payment from a South Korean Company that is facing trade investigations. The Trump family is a crime orgnization. Have a good day!
Is that against the law?
Right now it appears to be NO!
So I guess by your argument, Hunter serving on the board of Burisma was also not against the law – right? Someone better tell Turley since Hunter lives in his head rent free….
Easy for communists to confuse legitimate business from corrupt and shady dealings, but hey here we are.
Under communism all legitimate business is against the law.
@anonyass 1:26PM. Confusing statement, is your statement that Trump has personally accepted a $2MM payment from a South Korean Company? Or were you just professing your brown shirt beliefs that you, as the God of Light and Truth are just telling others where they should paint the stars and destroy those who should be required to wear yellow stars on their left breast?
sorry – I should have provided more details. This is the story: “The lead investor in a South Korean aluminum company that has challenged Commerce Department penalties on certain exports from South Korea to the United States made a $2 million payment last year to President Trump’s holding company. The payment by the parent company, Base Group, was revealed for the first time in Mr. Trump’s annual financial disclosure form released in late June. The document offered only a cryptic explanation for the payment, stating that it was part of a “letter of intent” and a “nonrefundable development fee.” In statements to The New York Times, the company and the Trump family said the payment relates to a still-unannounced golf course project. Base Group has spent nearly a decade courting the Trump family, exclusively selling Trump-branded wine in South Korea and, more recently, hosting Mr. Trump’s son Eric at its Seoul headquarters. The topic at the February gathering, according to a company executive: ways to increase trade between South Korea and the United States.The efforts by Base Group to build ties with Mr. Trump and his family come as its corporate affiliate, Korea Aluminium, has curbed exports to the United States after the Commerce Department concluded that a group of South Korean companies circumvented trade duties on Chinese-made aluminum.”
And I seem to have violated the first rule of logical discourse. I admit guilt and stupidity: “Never argue with an idiot, a bystander will not be able to tell the difference.”
The question was “is your statement that Trump has personally accepted a $2MM payment from a South Korean Company” are you making that statement or are you saying in your statement: a “$2 million payment last year to President Trump’s holding company” indicated he made that deal of direct contract and received direct payment for it?
NOTE: OT and nothing to do with this question unless, of course you statement also asserts the draining of the US National Oil Reserves under the direct order of President Biden where more than 6MM barrels of it went to China with a $464MM personal acceptance by President Biden was the same.
“From September 2021 to July, the Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded three crude oil contracts with a combined value of roughly $464 million to Unipec America, the U.S. trading arm of Chinese state-owned oil company Sinopec, according to a review by The Epoch Times of the DOE documents. A Chinese firm with ties to Hunter Biden had made an investment in the national oil giant.”
https://www.usnn.news/us-sold-nearly-6-million-barrels-of-oil-reserves-to-china-records-show/
or was it just:
well ALL business ventures are a crime to a commie. “means of production” and all that.
It’s part of the brand.However the rest of us normal people see Trump as a intelligent businessman i.e. successful.
Tell me why YOU didn’t take part in the opportunities our system provided you? low self-esteem? childhood trauma? narcissistic TDS?
Overall: Partly true, partly false. Some factual claims are supported by evidence; the claim that the Trump family is a criminal organization is not supported as fact.
Claim 1: “Trump has personal financial ties with nearly 30 different business ventures with foreign counterparts.”
Assessment: Substantially true. Donald Trump’s financial disclosures show that his businesses have financial relationships with numerous foreign entities in multiple countries. The precise number (“nearly 30”) depends on how one counts separate ventures or counterparties, but the underlying claim that he has extensive foreign business relationships is supported by public disclosures.
Claim 2: “Trump has recently accepted a $2 million payment from a South Korean company that is facing trade investigations.”
Assessment: Largely true, with important context. Public financial disclosures show that Trump’s holding company reported receiving a $2 million payment from Base Group, a South Korean company whose affiliate, Korea Aluminium, is involved in an ongoing U.S. trade matter. The payment has been described by both the company and the Trump Organization as a nonrefundable development fee related to a proposed golf course project. There is currently no public evidence that the payment was connected to the trade investigation or that Trump intervened in that matter.
Claim 3: “The Trump family is a crime organization.”
Assessment: False as a statement of fact. This is a personal opinion or rhetorical accusation, not an established fact. No U.S. court has found that the Trump family constitutes a criminal organization or racketeering enterprise. Individual members and Trump-related business entities have faced civil judgments and some criminal convictions involving specific business practices, but those findings do not establish that the Trump family is a criminal organization.
Tax Uniformity Amendment
The effective tax rate on a thing cannot depend on the quantity of the thing being taxed.
That would solve many problems. No deductions, flat tax. Fairer, more economically beneficial in terms of job creation, and close off an avenue for power-hungry politicians to demagogue – and destroy their own tax base – with “tax the rich” slogans.
Calling a flat tax ‘fair’ is a complete economic delusion. A flat tax completely ignores the reality of inflation and the cost of living. Charging a schoolteacher and a billionaire the exact same tax rate completely crushes the working class’s purchasing power while handing the ultra-wealthy a massive, unearned tax break.
The idea that this magically creates jobs is an obsolete fairytale. Every time supply-side experiments like this are tried—like the catastrophic Kansas tax cuts—they end in massive deficits, crumbling public services, and zero economic growth.
True economic health happens from the bottom up, when working families have money to spend, not from the top down. A flat tax isn’t ‘uniformity’—it’s just a slick way to codify a billionaire protection racket and shift the entire tax burden onto regular people.”
Perhaps the amendment should also give a cap on the tax rate, at least for income. A max 10% or even 15% income tax would not be crushing, and would be a lower effective tax rate than most people already experience. As for that constituting a “tax break” for high income earners, no, it just means they have more of their income left to invest and incentivize further economic activity. They can spend it far more efficiently than the government can; the more that goes to the government, the more is wasted on economically inefficient activities (such as $700 toilet seats, or empty day care centers in Minnesota). One thing socialists get wrong about the wealthy: they don’t put their money under a mattress. They hire people with it. Then those people have an income and contribute to the tax base.
You keep harping that billionaires should be able to keep their income because they will invest in further economic activity.
BUT THE BILLIONAIRES DO NOT HAVE TAXABLE EARNED INCOME !!!!!
They fund their lifestyle by borrowing heavily at very low interest rates using their stock holdings as collateral. They do not have any income to invest. Their wealth is tied up in their stock holdings which they never touch. And the real kicker is that when those stock holdings pass to their children after they die, the children inherit everything at a stepped up cost basis, so the wealth is never taxed. Those who inherit the wealth just keep doing the same thing as their parents, and it is passed to the next generation ad infinitum without any tax consequences.
You have fallen for the myth that the mega-billionaires have created in order to convince you to vote for the Republicans and thus preserve the status quo.
THEY ARE LAUGHING AT YOU !!!!!!
My tax uniformity proposal would not limit the subject of taxation to income. It would just say that, whatever the government taxes, it has to tax that thing in a uniform way. Flat tax, no deductions. That could apply to personal income, consumption, property, corporate income, capital stock, capital gains, etc.
what crushes the working class’s purchasing power is government money manipulation, high taxes and it’s failure to educate the working class among other things.
the USA has THE MOST progressive tax in the entire world where the top pay ALL the taxes and it’s still not enough for the disgustingly greedy left. they want equity in all things (communism), not equality before the law (capitalism). They are the ultimate takers, haters, and envious slobs. Disgusting.
not going to happen and all the screeching is because of it is getting stomped out while they call for more of their malfeasance against humans.
Tell me why is it greedy for me to want to keep more of what I earned, but not greedy for the lazy leftoids to want to take what they didn’t earn?
socialism extinguishes ambition which is just what they need to control us. It’s anti-human.
Let’s start with instituting a 50% tax on any increase in wealth of a congressman after their election.
Blah, blah, blah—more MAGA attacks and Turley trying to sell his book. As to “court packing”–at least half of Americans support adding more judges to balance out the radical right wingers. Turley harps on this, because he is a paid MAGA pundit–but Turley knows that the Constitution does not contain any limit or specific number of judges for the SCOTUS, and there have been varying numbers over the years. Leo Leonard’s Federalist Society has “packed” the Court with radical right wingers that most Americans have an unfavorable view of, and MAGA wants to keep it that way. As is usual with Trump, MAGA and Republicans, cheating and lying got them the power they wanted. Obama was denied a SCOTUS nomination because McConnell refused to allow it on the floor–allegedly because of the proximity of the election; however, when Ginsberg died, that rule was thrown out so they could shove Barrett onto the Court. Barrett, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch all lied about their position on stare decisis–claiming that Roe v. Wade was “settled law”–and then they came up with a way to overturn it. Most Americans do not agree with this decision. But, according to MAGA, we just have to wait for some of these people to die, resign or retire–or, do we? Where is the law that sets in stone the number of SCOTUS justices at 9? There isn’t one.
And, the majority of Americans want term limits, too. Turley claims that “politicians” are the ones seeking to divide the country into the “haves and have nots”. Billionaires do NOT pay proportionately the amount of tax that less-wealthy Americans pay–and, that’s not fair–people are not sheep that “need” to be told this–just another MAGA reason to attack Democrat politicians. Passive sources of income, like capital gains, are taxed lower than income people earn by working. And the Big Ugly Bill Republicans passed mostly benefits the wealthiest. From “The Budget Lab”:
“Tax preferences like deductions, credits, and preferential rates are the drivers of gaps between effective tax rates and statutory tax rates. For example, the existing tax code implements lower tax rates for certain kinds of personal income, like capital gains and business profits, compared to wage earnings. Similarly, certain expenses like mortgage interest and state and local taxes are deductible when determining taxable income. These provisions, which are only available to certain tax filers, generate divergent tax burdens (even among those with similar incomes). Because these types of provisions are not equally available to low-income and high-income filers, the ability to pay lower than one’s statutory rate is not uniform.”
No one is trying to start “class warfare”–people just want the tax burden to be fairer.
Preach on, brother. Couldn’t have said it better. It’s amazing the GLARING legal topics that Turley avoids and dodges each and every day to rage bait his followers. For example – he COULD have commented on the Federal Judge who slapped down Trump’s attempt to sue his own government as an act of blatant anti-Constitutional self-dealing, even recommending that his attorney be disbarred – but no….he’d rather try to get his followers riled up about Hunter Biden….AGAIN.
You and the MSN lied about Hunter.
BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAH The Trump boys’ crimes make Hunter’s indiscretions look like shoplifting!
can you name one? try not to be insincere.
Ano
least half of Americans support adding more judges to balance out the radical right wingers.
__________________________
Love to see the report on this one. Which you failed to post
The poll was conducted by Marquette Law School. Look it up yourself.
Marquette Law School has a history of 80% contributing to Democratic Party candidates, especially from faculty.
Look it up yourself. Anyone who believes in polls without looking at the source is…… ________________.
Just an observation: Billionaires such as Khanna & Pritzker, who inherited wealth and apparently have not had to engage in serious efforts at wealth creation, are all eager to tax their own wealth (It was just there) and all the other wealthy individuals. Whereas Billionaires such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who worked to create their wealth, have had to flee states (Washington, California) that are salivating to take their wealth. If a national wealth tax ever is enacted and a Supreme court full of non-textualist, policy oriented Justices (e.g. Jackson) confirms it, then the Bezos and Musks of America will relocate more friendly climes. Would it not be simpler just to move on and cut the waste and fraud out and not kill the geese that lay the golden eggs?
The other difference between Khanna and Pritzker, versus Musk and Bezos, is that they’re politicians trying to hold onto or enhance their own political power. They would willingly be taxed more to get more power. Musk and Bezos are businessmen, who build business empires. Their power comes from supplying the market with goods and services that people are willing to purchase, thus showing the consumers value those goods & services more than their own money. Such business empires also create hundreds of thousands of jobs for people who then become taxpayers and add to the tax base. But in a political campaign aimed at the low-information voter, angrily saying “tax the rich” is simpler and more effective than explaining the actual economics behind why job creation benefits everyone.
To use your metaphor, everyone benefits if the geese that lay the golden eggs are protected so they can keep producing all that gold. But it is easier and more appealing to the low-information voter to say, “Let’s kill the geese so we can get the gold and redistribute it.”
Nonsense. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk did not accumulate their vast wealth from ‘work’. They accumulated the vast majority of their wealth from the work of other people, regulatory capture, tax avoidance and manipulation of the free market.
Taxing wealth is not, necessarily, likely to resolve the problem of wealth disparity imo. You simply can’t have a few billionaires/trillionaires owning 95% of the wealth. It is not sustainable.
It’s a structural problem. A perversion of the free market.
* I’m beginning to think AI may be the greatest grift in the history of Grifts. .. Trillion$ of market cap in the hands a few AI companies that depend entirely on human knowledge and massive energy consumption (which is why your electric bills are soaring).
When an entrepreneur builds a business, he employs others. He pays them for their work. They benefit by having jobs with which to support themselves and their families. The entrepreneur has a vision of how to supply customers with things they value, which the market is not currently supplying. Customers benefit by having a product choice they did not previously have. So claiming the entrepreneur did not work for it, but relied on the work of others, is frankly bizarre – and typical of your low-quality commenting.
The remainder of your comment accuses Bezos and Musk of unethical actions, but supplies no details. (It notably does not deny that their companies have supplied hundreds of thousands of people with jobs.) You made the claim that Bezos and Musk were acting unethically. If you make such a claim but provide no specifics, then you come off as not credible, and worse, your comment reeks of sour grapes.
Bezos and Musk are not laying many golden eggs .. . they have cornered the market of sour grapes.
*Bezos, in particular, is no ‘visionary’.. . I had a Free Fox Pro relational data base program that would match any criteria between ‘buyers/sellers’ all the way back in 1993.
Musk, otoh, is a good engineer/coder as I understand it, and understands great wealth disparity is not sustainable. .. that’s why he calls for a ‘universal income’ to supplement all those sour grapes.
Bezos and Musk are not laying many golden eggs
Together they employ over 1,700,000 people. Those are people who now have jobs, don’t need government assistance (or not nearly as much of it), and contribute to the tax base. For how many people have you created a job with which they can earn a living? My guess: zero.
So . . . what exactly is your actual complaint?
OldManFromKS,
How many people did it take for SpaceX/Musk to rescue those astronauts?
Those are worldwide employment numbers for Musk and Bezos. .. and I hear the great majority of the 1.5m workers Bezos employs barely make a living.
My compliant is the majority of Americans who don’t have a pot to pee in .. . or a window to throw it out of.
*That’s about 175,000,000. .. and you can add another hundred million lower ‘middle class’ barely hanging on by their finger nails.
My compliant is the majority of Americans who don’t have a pot to pee in. . . . That’s about 175,000,000.
That kind of claim does not seem to comport with reality. Even the poorest Americans have iPhones and transportation and abundant food and water. Unlike in Venezuela, they are not losing any weight.
Every single American is in the top 1% wealthiest on earth, even the homeless have cars here if they want.
I laugh every time i see a homeless guy with a “hungry” sign and let him know about free food from SNAP so he doesn’t ‘starve’. It’s all a grift.
Americans today have no idea what poverty is. Take a look at all those countries that provide no economic opportunities.
And any country with enormous natural wealth needs to be kept far from socialism because in such a country, a government doesn’t have any need of the people, they’re expendable as has been demonstrated.
oh my! Those poor poor people! Oh woe is them!
Is there something stopping them from just looking for a better job?
I don’t see you splitting the atom.
OldManFromKS,
Well said.
Musk’s SpaceX is in the lead for a non-government company launching rockets.
While I would not own one, Tesla vehicles are very innovative.
Taking SpaceX public, Musk created a whole bunch of millionaires.
and even if it’s a one-man business, it’s still providing customers with the things they need and that’s only the first win-win of capitalism, it also feeds our children amongst other niceties.
Post some proof DG, not opinion.
tax avoidance and manipulation of the free market.
Actually tax avoidance is not a bad thing. It’s doing what the government wants you to do, otherwise the government would not have put those incentives into the law.
People sometimes confuse tax avoidance and tax evasion. They are opposites. Avoidance is just doing what the government incentivizes you to do, thus fulfilling its policy objectives. Evasion is the same as tax fraud, it’s a crime.
Warren Buffet famously complained he pays less tax than his secretary. .. so, yes, even Buffet understands our inscrutable maze tax laws are not fair and cater to the rich.
In this way, the U.S. government creates more barriers to the free market.. . instead of promoting it.
*I think AT&T was the last time the U.S. gov broke up a major monopoly?
The U.S. government’s breakup of AT&T — known as the Bell System divestiture — was the result of a long-running antitrust case, United States v. AT&T, which began in 1974. The Department of Justice sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act, seeking to end AT&T’s near-monopoly over U.S. telecommunications
The byzantine nature of the tax code is a problem. Above, I’m suggesting a tax uniformity amendment which would get rid of deductions and make the tax rate uniform. This would completely simplify the tax code. Buffett and his secretary would pay exactly the same rate of taxes – say, 10% of their income. Buffet’s total tax bill would be huge, his secretary’s would be small.
OMFK – Warren Buffets income is small – and he pays much higher tax rates on it than his secretary.
Buffetsd revenue is the profits he makes from investment – and most of those are reinvested.
There is absolutely no use of Buffets wealth that provides a greater public benefit that Buffet investing it.
As to a simplified tax code – we are MOSTLY approaching that.
Despite Trump’s rhetoric – no taxes on tips and even no taxes on social security have been close to meaningless.
The Big deal has been the increases in the standard deduction – and the extra increase for those over 65.
Those have ZERO impact on those earning over 1M.
But they mean that a very large and growing body of americans pay very little or no income tax.
If you want a simple efficient and minimlally economically damaging tax system – eliminate ALL taxes except a single uniform consumption tax.
All taxes are ultimately taxes on consumption – some are just less direct than others, and more economically harmful.
A consumption tax is simple and everyone has skin in the game – it means that all government spending will have to justify itself to ALL voters – because there is no hiding of who is going to pay.
You will rapidly reduce government spending, and boost investment and the economy. You will eliminate most tax preparation.
John,
To claim Buffett pays a higher tax rate than his secretary is factually completely false. In his famous New York Times op-ed, “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich,” Buffett published his exact tax breakdown: his federal tax bill came out to a mere 17.4% effective rate.
Meanwhile, the average effective tax rate for the other 20 people working in his office—including his secretary—was 36%.
Why? Because Buffett’s income comes from long-term capital gains and dividends, which are capped at a low tax rate, while his secretary’s income comes from wages and salaries, which are hammered by top income brackets and regressive payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare). The system is mathematically designed to let a billionaire pay a lower rate than an administrative assistant.
Lower-income and middle-class families are forced to spend 100% of their paychecks immediately on consumption—groceries, gas, clothes, and rent—just to survive. A uniform consumption tax means they are taxed on every single dollar they make.
A billionaire like Warren Buffett only spends a microscopic fraction of his worth on personal consumption. The rest stays safely tucked away in investments. Under your system, an ordinary family pays a massive tax rate on their entire livelihood, while a billionaire pays a fraction of a percent on their total wealth. It is a massive tax hike on the working class disguised as “simplicity.”
You claim that changes to the tax code have “zero impact on those earning over $1M.” That is pure delusion. Trump’s corporate tax cuts aggressively slashed the top corporate rate from 35% to 21% and introduced massive loopholes like the Qualified Business Income (QBI) deduction, which allowed high-earning pass-through entities to write off 20% of their business income completely tax-free.
Combine that with the preservation of the carried interest loophole, and the system remains heavily tilted toward protecting billionaire private equity managers while shifting the long-term tax burden down to average taxpayers.
Your claims are so easily debunked.
X
Where do you think Buffett’s capital investment money comes from?
I’ll tell you.
PRIORLY-TAXED INCOME
His lament about paying less than his employee is more political than truthful.
And you, whose whole IQ is based upon what you read, fell for it.
The problem is inflation? When will bread cost 100 dollars per loaf? What’s the reason for that? What’s the reason for 22 million government employees? They produce nothing and the standards are rock bottom.
Warren Buffet also invests hundreds of billions in ways that are UNIVERSALLY better for all of us than any govenrment spending.
If you want the greatest benefit to the poor – you should not tax the rich at all.
Anytime anyone uses the word “fair” – they are always arguing the primacy of their personal values rather than principles. Fair does not exist.
No two people fully agree on what is fair.
Using Warren Buffett to argue for a 0% tax rate on the rich is a hilarious self-own. Buffett has spent over a decade publicly begging Congress to tax him more, explicitly stating that it’s a systemic disgrace that a billionaire pays a lower effective tax rate than his secretary.
Your idea that private investment naturally replaces public spending is a total fairytale. Private capital cannot function without the public bedrock. The companies Buffett invests in rely entirely on public infrastructure, roads, and tech like GPS developed by taxpayer dollars. Meanwhile, multi-millionaires like Kevin O’Leary aggressively demand working-class tax subsidies to fund private data centers.
We don’t need a philosophical debate on the word ‘fair’ to see the system is rigged. When the carried interest loophole lets a private equity mogul pay a lower tax rate than a schoolteacher, it’s a structural flaw, not a subjective opinion. The trickle-down theory of not taxing the rich was already tested in the catastrophic Kansas tax cuts—and it instantly cratered the economy and starved public schools. Try picking an example who actually agrees with your math next time.
But for your reliance on the word “hilarious” in your posts, I would have sworn that you were 100% AI, aNd sound alot like Olly with the “is not this, but that” sentence game, “it’s a structural flaw, not a subjective opinion.” That’s straight AI talk, not from your little brain.
Relying on the word “hilarious” is a thing? It can also be the fact that the majority of John Say’s claims are indeed hilarious, and also very wrong.
I personally want to thank him for buying Sees Candy. It’s delicious and would have perished. The price per pound has doubled but my income has not. I’m happy it’s still here.
The breakup of AT&T was stupid and meaningless – the market had already made the case irrelevant.
AT&T actually settled – because they could see the writing on the makert walls. Not because of the strength of the govenrments case.
At the Time AT&T was getting its ass kicked by competitors, and grasped that the value of its national telephone grid was inconsequential,
it looked to shed itself of the regional bell companies and focus on more lucrative long distance and cell service.
The government should have just stayed out of it and let the market work
John Say, why do you lie so much?
Saying AT&T was ‘getting its ass kicked’ in 1982 is a complete rewrite of reality. AT&T was the largest corporation on Earth, controlling over 80% of the U.S. telephone market and 100% of the long-distance grid. Competitors weren’t winning; they were being choked out because AT&T illegally refused to let them connect to the local lines.
The market couldn’t ‘work’ because AT&T ran a total dictatorship where you couldn’t even plug a third-party answering machine into your wall without their permission.
They didn’t voluntarily ‘shed’ the local grid because it was ‘inconsequential’—they surrendered it because the Department of Justice’s antitrust case was so completely bulletproof that federal judges were about to forcefully dismantle the company. The settlement was a legal plea deal to save their own skin, and the resulting competition is the exact reason the modern digital and cell economy exists today. Try opening a history book before defending a literal textbook monopoly.
AT&T was preventing the free market from functioning as it should have.
100% of the long-distance grid
MCI had been around since 1963, and Sprint since before then. AT&T was dominant but not 100%.
No one said MCI and Sprint didn’t exist; the point is that AT&T used its physical infrastructure to actively choke them out of the market. According to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), even after the lawsuit began, AT&T still controlled over 90% of the entire U.S. long-distance market. MCI and Sprint were left fighting over the single-digit crumbs that fell off Ma Bell’s
You have backed off the claim of 100%, and now claim 90%. So you are admitting your 100% claim was wrong. Thanks.
yet warren buffet is not talking about HIS own money. Because, who’s stopping him from paying what he feels ‘is right’?
Warren Buffet wants other peoples money AND he’s a hypocrite because he can get what he wants, to pay more, but won’t do it unless he can inflict the same crap on everybody. Childlike thinking and everyone sees it.
A tax on the rich is a tax on everybody human’s ambition to be better off. Why try when the commies just take what you’ve worked for?
They want all humanity equitably dragged down into the mud, where capitalism has brought us all of modernity, security and comfort.
“Actually tax avoidance is not a bad thing.”
Sorry – but it actually is a bad thing – it is just not a crime.
As Coases law demonstrates – the free market left alone will best allocated resources. When friction is low and property rights are enforced.
Changes in behavior as a result of taxes are always NET negative – they cause people to diverge from the better choice they would have made.
This is also why we do not want goivenrment subsidizing things – again it distorts peoples choices.
Sorry – but it actually is a bad thing
This is an equivocation on the word “bad.” I mean that the government does not consider it bad (unlike with tax evasion). It’s doing things that comport with government policy objectives. Your argument is that those policy objectives are not economically efficient. By and large that’s true, as with subsidies, but we would have to go one by one. They are not all created equal.
Tax avoidance is not inherently good or bad. It’s political.
I’m glad you clarified this as these greedy leftys would take getting married and having ‘dependents’ as tax evasion.
“You simply can’t have a few billionaires/trillionaires owning 95% of the wealth. It is not sustainable. ”
why not? is there only so much wealth to go around like Scrooge McDuck and his swimming pool of cash?
Is there no way to CREATE wealth? only HOARD it?
Are you sure you want to publicly be speaking about things like this as you don’t understand the first thing about economics and no wonder you cannot support a system you don’t understand creates wealth where there was none before. Wealth is only limited by human ingenuity and willpower and it’s powered by freedom. While you’re feeling all victimy, why not try creating some wealth yourself?
Let’s pretend anon, no one knew of any billionaires. Let’s say they’re low profile people and no one knows them. Let’s be concerned with what we then know. The 99% who own 5% of the money is what we know. That’s all we’re aware of. Now what’s wrong with the economy? That’s reality. Remove 95% of the wealth here before creating the fictional economy. REMOVE 95% of breads price per loaf. That’s your economy.
500 dollar plastic shoes made somewhere? No ones buying that junk. It’s bankrupt at go.
Remove the 1% from your thinking.
Khanna is not a billionaire – but he is a centi-millionaire.
His wealth is not inherited – it is through marriage.
While the american dream is to be the self made millionaire – and there is absoltuely something to to the people like Carnegie or Rockefellor, or Musk or …
Who made their fortunes themselves, regardless the Wealthn of even Trust fund babies is pretty universally creating jobs and wealth and massively benefiting all of us.
Wealth taxes are the absolute totally completely stupidest form of taxation their is.
Without any doubt most billionaires are conspicous consumers – but their consumption unlike those in the middle class is a TINY portion of their worth or even their income.
The entire rest of their assets are universally INVESTED in something.
All but the absolute worst private investment FAR EXCEEDS the societal benefits of money spent by the government.
Globally 4th IDEAS RESPEC ranked harvard economist Robert Barro with the most comprehensive data on Govenrment spending found that for every $1 that govenrment spends (invests) $0.25-$0.35 of value is created – in otherwords on Net Government spending DESTROYS more value than it creates. To end up with a net gain in standard of living – INCLUDING they fact that the majority of people spend nearly all they produce – there must be a massive amount of capital WELL INVESTED to ballance the drag created by government
The idea that private billionaire capital is inherently superior to public investment is an absolute joke. Private wealth cannot exist without the public bedrock. Elon Musk’s companies were built on a foundation of government loans, tax credits, and NASA contracts, while the entire Silicon Valley tech boom relies on the internet and GPS—both developed entirely with public taxpayer money.
You claim billionaires always ‘well invest’ their cash, yet multi-millionaires like Kevin O’Leary aggressively demand working-class tax subsidies to fund private data centers. When the ultra-wealthy use legal gymnastics like the carried interest loophole to pay lower effective tax rates than teachers, they aren’t ‘creating jobs’—they are leeching off the system.
Quoting macroeconomic papers out of context won’t change reality. Public investments in roads, education, and healthcare create the very foundation that allows capitalism to function. A wealth tax isn’t ‘destroying capital’—it’s forcing the ultra-wealthy to pay for the public infrastructure they used to build their fortunes in the first place.
FYI, the entire Silicon Valley tech ecosystem—which drives California’s record $4.3 trillion GDP—exists because the federal government funded the development of the internet (ARPANET) and GPS using public taxpayer money. Private capital didn’t build the foundational tech; it just monetized.
private billionaire capital investment is driven by those looking for personal success, and the application of their personal ‘drive’, working within a secure and moral contractual system.
public investment is a forced ‘investment’ with dubious public payoff by disinterested politicians with a definition of success as their power over others and a possible social payoff for their aggrandizement and continuance in power.
Everyone can take part in the personal, but only a few can reign in power over others.
“The idea that private billionaire capital is inherently superior to public investment is an absolute joke. ”
No it is a fact – I cited the Barro study on the return abysmal return of Government spending.
“Private wealth cannot exist without the public bedrock. ”
Correct – that bed rock is the rule of law – and the cost of that is a few percent of GDP at most. All government beyond that is distortion and waste.
Further – contra the left government is even more dependent on the “bedrock” of the private economy.
If you wish to live in a world with zero growth – Go back to the 10th century and before when you were lucky to get 1% rise in standard of living per century.
We had govenrment then – but 99% of people lived in abject poverty and the top 1% lived far crappier than the poor today.
All the government programs you fawn over are paid for by SUCCESSFUL private Capital investment.
Allegedly milton friedmen visited a chinese damn project and was surprised to find numerous workers digging with shovels. Yet, machines could accomplish the task more quickly and efficiently. Friedman asked Why aren’t you using earth-moving equipment? The response was You don’t understand. This project is designed to employ large numbers of people. Freidman responded If creating jobs is your primary objective, then perhaps you should give the workers spoons instead of shovels.
Standard of living rises when humans produce more than humans value with less human effort.
Whether it is the knitting jenny, the backhoe, or AI – making people more productive requires private capital investment – Government investment has a disastrously inefficient record. Aside from the OBVIOUS – that successful people like Buffet and Musk are OBVIOUSLY far better at making investments than those in government – why would anyone think that anyone who was able to invest with the skill of Warren Buffet – or your average IRA manager would take a ob in Government ?
But aside from the fact that the free markets self select moving capital to those best at investing it – YOUR idiocy the top x% has 90% of the money.
Of course they do they are the best investors in the world bar none – and 99.99% of their money is INVESTED.
Regardless for government to invest money they must FIRST confiscate it from people who inarguably are far better at investing than government.
Anything that startts with Theft – is ALWAYS less efficient – so Government ALWAYS starts at a loss.
Investment improves productivity – that means fewer people producing the same goods – people who are paid more, and that frees up alot of labor to produce something else that we value . Which Compounds the benefit.
Government does not understand that. YOU do not understand that. But more importantly this happens AUTOMATICALLY in the free market – you do not have to plan for it.
Someone is ALWAYS trying to profit by making a better mouse trap.
Top down planning is extremely expensive and inefficient – it always underperforms.
“Regurgitating an online urban legend about Milton Friedman and spoons won’t fix your economic blindness. Nobody is trying to replace backhoes with spoons; we are asking billionaires to stop freeloading off the system.
Your idea that private billionaire capital is inherently superior to public investment completely ignores reality. Elon Musk’s companies were bankrolled by government loans, tax credits, and NASA contracts, while the entire tech economy relies on the internet and GPS developed entirely by public taxpayer dollars.
“Elon Musk’s companies were built on a foundation of government loans, tax credits, and NASA contracts, while the entire Silicon Valley tech boom relies on the internet and GPS—both developed entirely with public taxpayer money.”
All false.
While you are atleast partly correct that government as “involved” – the claim that they were the foundation is complete nonsense.
Government does loan money – and that is a really stupid mistake – we do not want the people in government who are clueless as to what the correct price for risk making loans.
Regardless all private businesses will accept cheap govenrment money if they can get it – but that is just income redistribution from the poor to the rich.
All income redistribution is evil – up or down does not matter – it is still stealing.
No business that should exist needs govenrment money. I know that you do not understand this but Stock is private money – and there is far more of it than there is govenrment money – it is just that ordinary people are prohibited by stupid laws from using stocks (and other forms of private money) as money.
When you buy a stock – you give money to the company to invest to produce wealth that you then own a share of.
Long before govenrment loaned anyone a dime – investors funded companies.
Most of SpaceX’s revenue is through private contracts to place satellites in space – it charges based on size and weigh.
It charges NASA much the same as it does AT&T. Today 3/4 of what is in space is private, of the rest half is defense related.
Regardless, Govenrment is not subsidizing SpaceX it is paying for something that it can not gewt elsewhere cheaper and that it has after 60 years of trying Failed to be able to do itself for 1/100th the cost SpaceX can.
Atlas V Rockets still exist and NASA still has launch platforms for them. They are unused because they cost nearly 100 times as much as SpaceX.
The Space Shuttle was retired because it NEVER lived up to its promised improved efficiency.
Contra YOUR idiotic claim – it is GOVERNMENT that is benefiting from SpaceX – for SpaceX NASA is two things – a customer and a regulator – it is NOT an investor.
With respect to tax credits like govenrment loans – private companies are ALWAYS going to take free money when offered it.
But like Government loans – Tax credits DISTORT the market – they result in poorer choices than would occur otherwise.
That is ALWAYS true when the money must be confiscated from someone else.
It is also always true when some idiot in C=Government thinks it is a good idea to loan money at a rate discounted from what the market would price the risk.
One of the major reasons that Socialism fails is because it can not properly PRICE things – something the market does automatically – Government is totally inept at.
This is true whether government is running a tractor factory or pretending to be a Bank.
The free market AUTOMATICALLY rewards those who are good at investing capital with more capital. There is very little cost to that process and should anything change – the market will automatically adjust.
Again – Nothing happens automatically when Government does it. What Bureaucrat do you think has the skill to decide whether Musk or Buffet or some Freind of Trump’s or Pelosi’s is a good choice to invest with ?
What Bureacrat do you think has the skills needed to decide what the correct interest rate for a loan is ?
SpaceX would likely exist regardless – but if it did not because there were no government loans or tax credits – something else would and that something else would be a better use of that capital.
Again all this is, is Coase’s law in action – Strong property rights, limited friction and the rule of law and everything else takes care of itself the best way that is actually possible.
While Ferdinand and Isabella funded Columbus – Roanoke, Jamestown, and even Plymouth were entirely privately funded.
Do you think putting a rocket in space today is a bigger risk that sending a ship full of people accross the ocean in the 16th century ?
The ONLY legitimate role of govenrment is protecting property rights and insuring the rule of law.
Everything else takes care of itself with no public involvement.
Saying ‘all false’ and then spending half your comment explaining why Elon Musk took hundreds of millions in federal loans and NASA rescue contracts is absolutely hilarious. You didn’t disprove the foundation; you just admitted it exists and then complained that you don’t like it.
Elon Musk himself admitted SpaceX was on the verge of bankruptcy until a $1.6 billion NASA lifeline saved the company. Tesla was kept alive by a $465 million federal loan in 2010. Private stock money didn’t fund the invention of the internet or GPS—public taxpayer dollars did.
Your history is just as fabricated as your economics. Jamestown was such a catastrophic private corporate failure that the British government had to step in and turn it into a Royal Colony just to keep the settlers from starving to death.
Even your citation of Coase’s Law backfires, since Coase explicitly proved that real-world markets are full of frictions that require regulatory balance. Billionaires like Kevin O’Leary who demand working-class tax subsidies to build private data centers aren’t ‘organic market geniuses’—they are public-sector dependents. Crying ‘theft’ won’t change the fact that private wealth relies entirely on the public infrastructure regular taxpayers foot the bill for.
As to the Internet -Is there ANYTHING Al Gore has ever said that was true ?
The foundations of the internet were the MIT Model Railroad Club – a LATER DARPA contract bought a few modems and equipment.
The early internet was developed by students – often paid for to the extent they were paid at all on private contracts and often the equipment was donated by or provided at a discount by companies like AT&T.
There has NEVER in the entirety of US history been a time in which “the internet” operated over an actual public network – for most of the early decades it ran entirely over the telephone network built and developed by AT&T – Further AT&T not govenrment provided most of the funding and development – Unix was produced by AT&T – not the govenrment – it was not even a govenrment project. AT&T developed it initional is the platform for its billing systems.
Idiots like you and Al gore forget some things – One of which is that I WAS THERE.
Before the internet existed – I was networking Microcomputers initially accross an S100 backplane and later across an RS422 network. We had broader networks transfering files via Fax or modems and BBS systems. I had wireless networks between my home and office using AT&T’s wavelan – long before the internet escaped DARPA. Other networks – ARCNET 3COM’s NetBeui and Novell’s IPX SPX were serving businesses before TCP/IP. TCP/IP – eventually replaced these – but mostly because it was more robust over unreliable links. Regardless, TCP/IP is just a communication protocol. Claiming that Government was responsible for the internet is like Claiming that therew would be no sprfeadsheets without Lotus 123 – there were many competing spreadsheets – EVEN today.
TCP/IP was just one of those. Further over top of TCP/IP were other protocols – some developed in universities – like SMTP, some developed in research Labs like HTTP,
Soem funded by govenrment many not funded at all – just developed by people scratching an itch. Some of those other protocols still exist – others are long gone.
And all of this has ALWAYS run over entirely privately provided infrastructure – either AT&T’s phone network originally or the private cable system or today over privately provided fiber.
While it is true that a significant portion of the internet was initially developed over top of an existing Private regulated monopoly network – the claim that we have the internet because of the govenrment just means you are stupid.
I have personally written TCP/IP stacks for embedded systems – as well as a number of other communications protocols.
For someone boasting about being there, your tech history is completely broken. The internet didn’t sprout out of a model railroad club; it was 100% funded, directed, and built by the U.S. Department of Defense through ARPANET.
You claim TCP/IP was just a random protocol, but it was explicitly created under a DARPA contract by Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. It beat out private protocols like Novell and 3Com because the U.S. military literally mandated on January 1, 1983, that every computer on the network had to use it.
Furthermore, the entire national network ran over the NSFNET backbone—a high-speed highway built entirely by the federal National Science Foundation, where commercial traffic was legally banned until the mid-90s.
Crediting AT&T is a joke; they were offered the internet in the 1970s and turned it down because their executives stupidly claimed packet-switching would never work. Private capital didn’t build the foundation; the public sector took the multi-million dollar risk, created the tech, and then private companies stepped in to monetize it. Writing code doesn’t mean you get to rewrite history.
Clearly you’re historically illiterate.
You are so shallow that sea level looks like a mountain.
Where do you think ARPANET got its intellectual backbone?
When XX opens his mouth, like Alphabet Soup, out comes an A then an I, then another A, then another I, and so on.
Who paid for it S. Meyer? That’s the key. DARPA. As in taxpayers thru the defense department. Think man. Think.
GSX, your premise is wrong.
Since we are dealing with Musk (SpaceX), let me provide one example. Who created the Saturn V Rocket, the financier, the US government through the taxpayer, or Wernher von Braun?
“Who paid for it?” is the moron’s answer.
“You claim billionaires always ‘well invest’ their cash, yet multi-millionaires like Kevin O’Leary aggressively demand working-class tax subsidies to fund private data centers. ”
Of course they do – idiots like you started havingf government subsidize projects. In what world do you think those excellent private investors would not Rush to get free or cheap money to invest ?
“When the ultra-wealthy use legal gymnastics like the carried interest loophole to pay lower effective tax rates than teachers, they aren’t ‘creating jobs’—they are leeching off the system.”
You do not even know what you are talking about.
First – I do not give a crap about “carried interest” – Government absolutely positively should NEVER tax money that is invested privately PERIOD.
It is by far the most economically destrictive thing that Government can do.
If you MUST tax income – which is only slightly less stupid that taxing investment – then Tax that income ONLY when that income is REAL.
That is when a worker is paid or an investor removes that money from investment.
With respect to “carried interest” – this is little different from Capital gains.
The 2nd most destructive form of taxation is taxing the profits from investments.
But like left wing nut idiots – You are OK with government subsidizing the front end with mispriced loans – but suddenly on the back end when the risk has paid off – you want to take the lions share.
If you tax the profits of investment at all you want to tax them LIGHTLY – Investments are capital that was put at risk – the higher the tax on investment income the lower the return the less investment you get the lower economic growth is.
“Quoting macroeconomic papers out of context won’t change reality. ”
Correct – that is NOT what I have done., Actually read some REAL economics. Romer is almost the far left of the economic world.
I could have quoted Friedman, or Hayek, or Acemoglu, or Buchanon or any of a long list of Actual Nobel winners whose work is FAR MORE DAMNING.
“Public investments in roads, education, and healthcare create the very foundation that allows capitalism to function.”
Nope All of these things you claim are “foundational” came AFTER Free Market capitalism provided the massive amounts of growth and high standard of living to be able to afford them.
Here is Masolws hierarchy of needs
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/60/Maslow%27s_Hierarchy_of_Needs.svg/1920px-Maslow%27s_Hierarchy_of_Needs.svg.png
All of the things you call foundational are 2nd tier or above. Humans do not do ANY of those until they are productive enough to meet FIRST tier needs.
You have no clue what a a foundation is. Healthcare, educations, etc are all LUXURY goods that are paid for by the rising standard of living that Free markets deliver better than anything else.
You rant about the internet – and are clueless about how it actually came about – I WAS THERE – I PARTICIPATED in a small way.
Regardless, the internet was impossible without the computer which was impossible without the transistor, which was impossible without electricity, which was impossible without people with enough wealth and free time to engage in science.
Even today most research is privately funded – but 100 or 500 years ago – it was either funded by or performed by wealthy people in their free time – whether it is Newton or Franklin or ….
People do not do put resources towards education or healthcare until they have created enough wealth to feed, cloth and shelter themselves with a fair amount left over. Even Government itself is NOT a fundamental need – Government is a luxury good of a society that is wealthy enough to afford it.
Like most left wing nuts – you are oblivious to the reality of the world prior to the 21st century – you do not grasp that for 99.99% of human existance – people struggled just to feed themselves. That nearly all human effort was directed to food, and shelter. That nothing else occured until Humans were productive enough to produce MORE than than the minimums thy needed.
Education is a luxury good that only an afluent socity can afford, as is healthcare, as is ….
Whether those things are provided privately or by government they DO NOT HAPPEN until humans are productive enough to be able to afford them.
Production comes FIRST ALWAYS – Before everything else – it is The first requirement for survival.
Absolutely everything else is a luxury good that a society can afford as it becomes more productive.
” A wealth tax isn’t ‘destroying capital’”
Of course it is – if you take invested capitral from people who are using it to boost – not just their personal wealth but the productivity of the world, and you transfer that capital to govenrment – which destroys $0.75-0.65 of every Dollar that it takes in – that is the DESTRUCTION of capital.
Even if by some miracle – Government broke even on the capital it consumed – and No economist Ever has found that
This is not the specific Barro Paper I normally cite – but it will do – it cites a large numbers of economic studies in its conclusion ALL of which found govenrmnent spending including investment and education to NEGAIVELY impact growth.
https://dash.harvard.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/7312037c-55ef-6bd4-e053-0100007fdf3b/content
Again NO ONE has ever found govenrment spending to positively raise standard of living.
I will be happy to ceded that at SOME level – providing the basics – the rule of law. has a positive INDIRECT return – a people can function without govenrment – but as Hobbes said “life is nasty brutish and short” the Fundamentals of government – the rule of law, basic defense do NOT themselves raise standard of living, but they do make free markets work more efficiently and that boosts standards of living.
But the cost of “the rule of law” is extremely low, further while it scales up with the number of people the cost actually scales DOWN as standard of living rises.
“it’s forcing the ultra-wealthy to pay for the public infrastructure they used to build their fortunes in the first place.”
This is a left wing nut myth – worse – even ifg it was actually true – the cost of Roads is tiny.
According to the St, Louis Federal Reserve – the total cost of all US Roads is approximately $140B/year
The total cost of the entire US Justice systems – courts, police incarceration, etc. is 1.4T/yr
It takes a special level of delusion to post a link to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and completely ignore that the chart lists health, safety, and physical resources as foundational tiers. Society doesn’t build roads and hospitals as a ‘luxury’ after they get rich; you cannot build a $4.3 trillion economy without a healthy, educated workforce and a public grid in the first place.
Your defense of Kevin O’Leary’s corporate welfare is hilarious. You’re admitting that billionaires aren’t ‘self-made geniuses’—they are just capital leeches rushing to get free money from working-class taxpayers to fund private data centers. Blaming me for it is even more amusing. Billionaires shouldn’t be asking for subsidies. But they do. Why are conservative billionaires asking for subsidies? Because they don’t want to deal with the high risk.
Your ‘zero taxes on wealth’ fantasy was already field-tested and utterly destroyed during the catastrophic Kansas tax cuts, which instantly ruined their economy and proved supply-side theories are a complete joke.
Dropping another Robert Barro paper won’t save you either, considering page 19 of your own link explicitly states that public investment in education and institutional infrastructure positively drives long-term GDP growth.
Taxation isn’t ‘theft’—it’s the cost of maintenance for the public system that billionaires exploit to hoard their fortunes. Stop misreading economic papers to defend an elite class that expects regular workers to foot the bill for their playing fields.”
“FYI, the entire Silicon Valley tech ecosystem—which drives California’s record $4.3 trillion GDP—exists because the federal government funded the development of the internet (ARPANET) and GPS using public taxpayer money. Private capital didn’t build the foundational tech; it just monetized.”
Nope.,
Again yuou beleive Al Gore who has never been right about anything.
Government did not fund the development of electricity – without which everything else would be impossible.
Government did NOT fund the development of the US telecommuinications network – again without that none of the rest would be possible.
Govenrment did not fund the deveopment of the relay, vacuum tube or later the transistor or semiconductor – ALL of these were developed by free markets.
Govenrment did not fund the development of the earliest computing machines – though it did fund the First Vaccume Tube computer – during WWII for the purpose of calculating artilery trajectories.
Regardless, That form of big iron computing has ENTIRELY died out – like the dinosaur.
Even the 2nd tier – Mini computers – such as those by Appolo, Sun, Data General, HP – are all Defunct.
All of today computers Trace their roots back to early semiconductors to the intel 4004 which was originally developed for calculators not computers and was not within 10,000 miles of Government.
The communications networked that the Internet is built on – was initially entirely provided by AT&T – a private monopoly.
The 3 great operating systems of the world today – *nix, Windows, and MacOS all developed completely privately – and all before the internet.
All except Unix started on Micro computers – which were completely outside the domain of government. Unix started on Minicomputers – again outside the domain of Government. Unix was/is also the control system for that entire AT&T communications network – and it was BEFORE there was an internet.
The Very early intgernet stated as a Train Control system for the model railroad club at MIT – not a government project. While DARAPA did step in a fund some developement – it originated outside of Government – and again ran entirely on a communications network provided b y AT&T.
The modems used for the very early internet were provided by BBN – a private company. Later when the internet actually expoded driven entirely by the widespread micro computer – now called PC – all having nothing to do with Govenrment – that occured on AT&T’s private phone network using Modems provided by entirely private companies. Later the internet expanded to ISDN – again the phone company, and then to DSL
Parts of TCP/IP were developed as part of DARPA.NSF funding – that is a protocol – not a network.
Ethernet was created by Bob Metcalf one of the founders of 3Com a private company.
There has never been a time in US history that the broad band networks that are the backbone of the internet were not entirely private.
To be clear – there was SOME relatively minimal govenrment funding in the development of SOME network protocols – though most were developed the same way open source software evolved – by people scratching an itch – not as part of any govenrment program. Much of the internet developed despite resistance by the US govenrment. Kerberos which is essential to network security was developed as part of a DEC/IBM joint venture the US govenrment then prevented the export of the software, MIT had to developed a version of Kerberose without any encryption ot export and then software developers in Europe and Australia wrote new encryption software to match MIT specs and it was then IMPORTED into the US to become a standard.
Most of what you think of as the internet has absolutgely nothing to do with government.
Governemtn had zero involvement is streaming protocols that deliver the overwhelming majority of content today.
Governement had a role in the Internet, but primarily funding University researtch and PRIVATE companies to build on ALREADY EXISTING technology to meet VERY SPECIFIC government needs.
Further TCP/IP which is the core protocol of the internet – eventually dominated Mostly because Private companies all agreed to adopt TCP/IP over their own protocols – ARCNET, NetBeui, NetBIOS, AppleTalk, Netware, because TCP/IP wopuld not give any of them a competitive advantaqe.
Today we are slowly seeing something similar with the RiscV CPU architecture – which is an open source system that ANYONE can use. It is slowly replacing ARM and intel because no one has to pay license fees and no one gets a competitive advantage from it. RiscV is increasingly used in Microcontrolers – GPUs Hard Drives, and embedded computing.
Yelling “Al Gore!” over and over again is not a substitute for historical fact. You have constructed an alternate timeline where the federal government just tossed a pocketful of loose change at a few universities. In the real world, private venture capital flat-out refused to touch the massive, high-risk financial burden of creating a decentralized, packet-switched global network. The public sector paid for the core infrastructure, and your “free market” simply stepped in later to monetize it.
You keep claiming that because early data traveled over AT&T’s physical wires, AT&T built the internet. This is a massive economic and technical fallacy.
AT&T owned the raw copper wires, just like a private logging company might own a dirt path. But the actual internet backbone—the high-speed routers, switching nodes, and transcontinental T1 and T3 data highways—was funded, built, and managed entirely by a federal agency: the National Science Foundation (NSFNET).
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. government legally banned all commercial traffic from the internet backbone. Private businesses were not allowed to use it for profit. The internet was a strictly public, academic, and military infrastructure until the government officially handed the keys over to commercial networks in 1995. AT&T didn’t build the highway; they were forced by antitrust laws to let the government’s highway run over their raw wires.
Your claim that the government had nothing to do with the relay, the vacuum tube, or the semiconductor is completely false.
While Bell Labs invented the transistor, it was a clunky, expensive prototype. The only reason the transistor became cheap, reliable, and mass-produced was because the U.S. military placed massive, guaranteed procurement orders during the Cold War to build guidance systems for missiles and cold-war defense tech. The government single-handedly created the commercial market that allowed companies like Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel to exist.
You claim the Intel 4004 microprocessor was “not within 10,000 miles of government.” Wrong. The primary funding that allowed early Silicon Valley firms to survive and innovate in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s came from defense contracts. In the early years of the microchip, the U.S. military purchased over 70% of all integrated circuits produced in the United States. Private capital didn’t build Silicon Valley; the Department of Defense did.
You claim Unix was built purely for AT&T’s billing systems, completely erasing its actual history. Unix was developed at Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, who were heavily utilizing hardware and research environments funded by ARPA contracts.Furthermore, the version of Unix that actually built the modern internet—BSD Unix (Berkeley Software Distribution)—was funded directly by a multi-million dollar grant from DARPA to integrate the TCP/IP protocol stack directly into the operating system core. Windows and MacOS only became internet-capable later by copying the exact TCP/IP stack developed by government-funded engineers at UC Berkeley.
It is embarrassing that you are still repeating the myth that the internet started as a train control system at MIT. The tech you are thinking of is the TX-0 and PDP-1 computers, which the model railroad club members sneaked in to program during the night. And who paid for those massive, experimental computers at MIT? The U.S. Air Force and the Department of Defense. The students were playing on public military hardware.
Your claim that private companies just voluntarily agreed to adopt TCP/IP because it didn’t give anyone a competitive advantage is a total fairy tale. Private companies like Novell, IBM, and Apple fought bitterly to make their own proprietary, profitable protocols the global standard.They only abandoned their private networks because the U.S. Department of Defense legally mandated on January 1, 1983, that every computer connecting to the global network must use TCP/IP. The government used its massive market leverage to crush private, fractured protocols and force the world onto a unified, open-source standard.
It’s absolute clear you have no idea what you’re talking about.
GPS was actually developed for the military. Though the core actually came from one engineers brains storm that he could calculate his location with reasonable accuracy from the radio signals coming from Sputnik. GPS was not made available for civilian use until Reagan in 1988 as a result of the Russians shooting down a Korean Airliner that had strayed into russian airspace.
The Military still uses GPS and maintains the US constellation of GPS satelites, but virtually all non-military use is completely disconnected from the US govenrment.
Further There are now multiple constellations of “gps” satelites outside of The US government and commerical GPS receivers make use of multiple different GPS networks.
The core technology in GPS is fundamentally the same as counting the time between seeing a lightning flash and hearing the thunder to determine how far away the lightning is. There is lots of incredible engineering to GPS – all done privately – but the principles are older than the United States.
Reducing a multi-billion-dollar satellite network to an ancient lightning-flash math trick is a total joke. Private venture capital didn’t build the foundational technology of GPS; the U.S. Department of Defense spent decades taking the massive financial loss to invent atomic satellite clocks and launch the network.
Your claim that commercial GPS is ‘completely disconnected’ from the state is a massive technical error. Every smartphone on earth relies on a live public utility actively managed and operated by the U.S. Space Force, costing American taxpayers over $1.4 billion every single year to keep running.
Pointing out that other global networks exist completely blows up your own logic, considering that GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou are all owned and operated by foreign governments. Capitalist billionaires didn’t build a single one of them. Private tech companies didn’t create the digital world; they are just hitchhiking on an expensive public highway funded entirely by regular taxpayers. Try doing some basic research before posting your alternate history.
So your argument is that the small amounts of money that Government invested in GPS and the internet are somehow foundational ?
To What ?
Government funded much of the initial development of the US rail network – but the only railroad that has survived though to today without going bankrupt took absolutely no govenrment funding.
Government funding is not necessary for anything. – Not GPS, not the Internet.
nearly all satellites in space today are private.
Something like the internet was inevitable – government funded or not. Lots of other competing networks existed – as I noted – PRIVATE actors – Microsoft, IBM, Apple etc. chose TCP/IP as an industry standard because it gave no one a competitive advantage. The actual govenrment contribution to the internet was negligible.
AI is the current “next big thing” – it has next to nothing to do with Government.
While Government was INITIALLY heavily involved in the earliest computers – those Dinosaurs DIED and the modern computers ancestry ties back to the pocket Calculator NOT the Mainframe.
Most education in the world is private not public.
Nearly all healthcare in the world is private not public DESPITE claims that most nations have universal healthcare – in most of the world – that is words on a government brochure – the reality is almost no nations have a working government healthcare system.
Claiming AI has nothing to do with the government is the ultimate self-own. Look at Kevin O’Leary’s massive Stratos AI data center project in Utah right now. If private capital is so independent, why did O’Leary aggressively demand that local taxpayers heavily subsidize his private real estate? When caught red-handed trying to squeeze taxpayers to fund a playground for Google and Amazon, he literally told critics, ‘Welcome to America, buddy!’ and bragged about exploiting the system. AI isn’t an independent free-market miracle—it’s heavily dependent on public welfare and NDA’s.
Your railroad history is equally fabricated. James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway heavily relied on state subsidies, public land acquisitions, and local tax exemptions to survive. You focused on FEDERAL funding. Nice misdirection.
Your claim that universal healthcare is just a ‘brochure’ is an absolute joke. Every major OECD country on earth runs highly successful public or state-mandated healthcare systems that deliver longer lifespans and better outcomes than the U.S. for half the price. Your assertion that “almost no nations have a working government healthcare system” and that most healthcare is private is completely factually false.
Microchips didn’t shrink because of pocket calculators; they shrank because the U.S. military and NASA bought over 70% of all integrated circuits in the 1960s to build missiles and space capsules, single-handedly funding the foundation of Silicon Valley. Private billionaires aren’t organic market geniuses; they are just hitchhiking on an expensive public highway funded entirely by regular taxpayers. Taxpayers have every right to demand they pay their fair share in taxes for using taxpayer funded innovations that led them to their current wealth.
Sorry – how did Elon make his money? Oh that’s right – from tens of billions of dollars of federal dollars in seed money. Elon would be nothing without the US government subsidizing him – or by piggy backing off the creations of others. Which is all fine by the way – but don’t fool yourself into thinking he is some self-made man. He benefitted from enormous help.
More sour grapes. If it was that easy, why didn’t you get wealthy doing the same thing? And I would never make the ridiculous claim that an entrepreneur acts completely by himself and so doesn’t benefit from help. No one single person can do that kind of thing. That’s not how the world works. But someone has to have the vision and the executive talent. Musk and Bezos (and Bezos’s then-wife) have both vision and talent.
Here’s how Elon makes money: Today from Reuters: “Elon Musk’s xAI has installed more than double the number of gas turbines than it has publicly acknowledged to power its Colossus 2 data center project, without federal permits, and the pollution is hitting predominantly Black neighborhoods the hardest.”
If Elon’s data centers, or anyone else’s data centers, or anyone else’s industry of any kind, is creating pollution and foisting that cost onto everyone else, then it is appropriate for the government to see that the industry pays the cost of that pollution. I’m not sure how that negates anything else in this comment thread.
But when that government is run by Trump those cost will be heaped on the public, not the polluters. Those same polluters just need to “donate” at least $1 million to any of Trump’s LLC’s and they can be guaranteed the government won’t bother them.
what cost?
AGain – if you are actually being harmed by someone else you can sue them – it is called torts – it is older than our govenrment.
You prove actual damages and they must make you whole.
No amount of political donations works around that.
These anonymous idiots are making political points rather than discussing the complexity of the problem, which is a national security issue. The issue actually resembles what is said, and the two loud voices outside of those directly involved are the NAACP and the military. These are temporary and mobile turbines, legal in one set of laws. The question becomes how long it will take for the permanent power center to be built, which may be sooner than any adjudication.
I agree with you; the industry should pay the cost.
No – that is what Torts are for – if you are being harmed by the actions of another – you sue them and if you prove actual harm they must make you whole.
No regulation necescary.
Claiming that political donations can’t bypass tort law is the ultimate display of legal blindness. The entire reason billionaires pour millions of dollars into campaigns is to pass corporate immunity bills, forced arbitration loopholes, and strict damage caps that legally prevent regular citizens from ever suing them in the first place.
Look at Kevin O’Leary’s massive Stratos AI data center project in Utah. When he extracted public taxpayer subsidies while bragging ‘Welcome to America, buddy!’, he wasn’t playing by the rules of equal market risk—he was using political leverage to ensure regular families foot the bill for his private playground. You can’t use tort law to sue a billionaire for exploiting a rigged tax code like the carried interest loophole, which lets hedge fund managers pay a lower tax rate than a schoolteacher.
Furthermore, tort law is completely useless without a publicly funded court system and state-backed enforcement to make corporations pay up. Stop pretending the legal system is a neutral fairytale playground when billionaires spend billions specifically to buy the politicians who write the rules.
FYI, Corporations use political influence to insert “forced arbitration” clauses into nearly every contract, employment agreement, and terms of service. If a massive tech company steals your data or a private medical corporation harms you, you are legally barred from suing them in a real court of law. Instead, political donations have allowed corporations to force you into a closed-door, private arbitration system where the corporation picks the judge and wins up to 90% of the time.
Well said Old Man. Elon’s most visionary comment was when he tweeted this: “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein Files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” Then he had an even MORE visionary tweet following this one in which he said, “Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.” I couldn’t agree more with you, Old Man- vision AND talent!
Although that has nothing to do with the topic of this thread, if Elon is right, then why didn’t Joe Biden, in four years, publicize that information? Nobody who believes Trump is implicated in the “Epstein Files” has ever provided an explanation for Biden’s four years of silence. Do you have one?
they do not.
Of course Trump is in the Epstain files – Epstain hated Trump and spent several years fixated on him.
wrong, idiot! reading is fundamental!
Musks first company was Zip2 had nothing to do with Government and was sold to Compaq for 307M in 1999 – 22M of which Musk pocketed.
Muskj then started X.com which later joined what eventually become PayPal. When that went public Musk received 175M.
Musk them formed SpaceX with his own money in 2002. Musk nearly went Bankrupt funding SpaceX but finally in 2008 He successfully put a rocket into Orbit.
After that Musk received Government contracts – NOT Subsidies. Primarily to deliver payloads to space at prices cheaper than anyone else including NASA was able to do.
The Government did not subsidize SpaceX anymore than it subsidizes the company it buys pencils from.
Starlink is an independent venture of SpaceX and has nothing to do with the US govenrment.
Musk invested 6.5M in Tesla in 2004 and become its largest shareholder.
Musk owns about half a dozen Other companies – Again – except that SpaceX is a government contractor – no different From Boeing or GM or Ford, there is no special “subsidy of Musk
Comparing a $1.6 billion emergency federal contract that saved SpaceX from total liquidation to buying office pencils is absolutely hilarious. Musk himself admitted SpaceX was completely broke and facing immediate bankruptcy in 2008 until NASA stepped in at the final hour to bankroll his entire operational survival.
Tesla was kept on life support in 2009 by a $465 million federal loan from the Department of Energy, without which mass production would have never happened.
Claiming Starlink and Tesla don’t rely on subsidies completely ignores reality. Tesla has pulled in billions in pure profit selling government-mandated regulatory credits and riding on consumer EV tax credits, while Starlink actively siphons millions in public rural broadband funding.
Billionaires like Elon Musk and Kevin O’Leary—who aggressively demanded working-class tax subsidies to fund his private Utah data center while bragging ‘Welcome to America, buddy!’—aren’t independent market geniuses. They are public-sector dependents. Taxation isn’t theft; it’s the bill billionaires owe for using the public infrastructure and taxpayer safety nets that made them rich in the first place.
Toi be clear – Government should not subsidize anyone or anything. It should not give tax breaks, it should not give discounted loans.
But the FACT that it does, does not make Government the driving force behind anything.
More often than not – Government subsidizes Failure – not success – Where is Solyandra ?
Businesses will ALWAYS seek out any advantages it can get – If Government offers tax breaks – businesses will take them.
If iut offers discounted loans – they will be gobbled up.
If it offers subsidies they will be consumed.
None of that makes Government a consequential contributor to anything.
In fact – AGAIN – government subsidizes failure more than success.
Admitting that billionaires aggressively ‘gobble up’ and ‘consume’ government loans, tax breaks, and subsidies completely blows up your entire narrative. You can’t argue that private capital is an independent, self-made miracle while simultaneously admitting it runs to the public sector for cash the second a low-interest loan is offered.
Trailing out Solyndra is a classic, outdated distraction. The exact same public loan program that backed Solyndra also bankrolled Tesla’s massive manufacturing factory, proving that public venture investments single-handedly created the modern EV industry while turning a massive net profit for the taxpayer.
Look at Kevin O’Leary’s massive Stratos AI data center project in Utah. He didn’t use pure private capital; he aggressively demanded working-class tax subsidies to fund his private real estate while literally bragging ‘Welcome to America, buddy!’ at the critics.
Billionaires use the carried interest loophole to pay a lower tax rate than a schoolteacher, while relying on a public grid, public roads, and a publicly educated workforce to make their money. Expecting them to pay a progressive tax isn’t ‘destroying capital’—it’s forcing corporate welfare dependents to finally pay their fair share for the public bedrock that keeps them rich. Stop making excuses for a rigged system. That “free market” is just a nice sounding fantasy.
Khanna and other Democrats hope to give the wealth nowhere to flee by taking this “hunt-the-rich” effort national.
I’m not sure why taking it national would leave them with nowhere to flee. The wealth would just flee the country to a tax haven. Wealth always finds a way to do that.
AI Overview
Wealth flees America to offshore tax havens through shell corporations, foreign trusts, and complex accounting strategies that exploit gaps between international legal jurisdictions. Because the United States taxes its citizens on worldwide income regardless of where they live, individuals rarely physically “flee”; instead, they utilize specialized financial structures to legally obscure ownership and move the tax liability of their assets abroad.
Thankfully, Mitch McConnell seems to be recoverering nicely.
https://substack.com/@borowitzreport/note/c-293680968
*. It’s robbery just like any other robber on the street. Will it ultimately become armed robbery? There isn’t a reason it won’t become armed considering these are robbers at heart and the MO is tax. Fundamental principles of criminals exposed. Do they know it? No because it’s learned and habitual. These are guns in the ribs with gut busters lifting your wallets.
Have a good day
Everyone’s fighting over trillions versus billions. That’s not the point.
Notice what X does with all this. He gets people arguing his numbers. Is it a trillion or not. Is home equity net worth or not. Did California really lose that much. That’s the trick. Once you’re debating his numbers, you’ve already accepted his premise. You’re arguing how big the theft is instead of whether the government has any right to it at all. He can win every math argument on this page and he still hasn’t answered the only question that counts. Where does the Constitution give Congress the power to tax a citizen’s property after it’s already been bought with taxed income?
If the government has no constitutional power to take a citizen’s wealth, the number doesn’t matter. Zero times anything is still zero.
Same with the Court. Pack it with 13 justices. Pack it with 25. The number isn’t the problem. The problem is Congress picking judges to guarantee a result. That’s not a court. That’s a rubber stamp in a robe.
The Framers didn’t write a Constitution that grows or shrinks based on who’s angry this week. Size isn’t legitimacy. Process is.
OLLY,
Great comment and for calling out X.
The other question is, is it Constitutional to tax unrealized gains?
As I noted below, once they start this tax (insert number here) -aires, at what number do they stop?
There is no such thing as unrealized capital gains. You don’t make or lose one cent until you sell. Remember Musk was a trillionaire.
Elon Musk was a trillionaire for 12 days.
Now what if the government had taxed him in those 12 days? He doesn’t have 12 trillion in the bank, it’s invested in companies. He would have had to sell affecting the market downward, destroying jobs and destroying capital. Also, would the government reimburse the tax on the wealth that never existed?
And when they start taxing wealth they will get to your wealth. Your home. Your savings, your collectibles and eventually your IRA, your 401K or your 403B. The Democrats have already said they want to tax those retirement savings, and you will have to cash out, pay the tax and the penalty. You may have to sell your home. Billionaires can afford to leave a state and leave the country to somewhere more tax friendly, can you afford that?
There is no such thing as unrealized capital gains.
Unrealized capital gains is a real term, not a made up one. Plain English version: it’s the increase in value of property you already own, before you sell it. You see that value on paper. You don’t have it in your pocket. That’s the whole distinction. The tax code has always waited for the sale because that’s the point where the gain becomes real money instead of a number on a screen.
Olly – it is a real term for something fake.
While we have massive systems and institutions to value things – and I own a business that is part of one of those.
The FACT is the value of something is what a willing buyer and a willing sellor agree to in an exchange.
There is no other value. The only time we know the actual value of anything is when it is sold.
This is a REALLY important economic construct.
It is also why the financial system locked up in late 2008 and why Tarp I and Tarp II did not work.
Banks owned Mortgage Backed securities and refused to sell them at a price that anyone was willing to buy.
Bankers were NOT stupid – they grasped completely that these Mortgage backed securities were worth more than $0.35/$1
All they had to do was hold them until the crisis passed – these MBS were shares in the ownership of mortgages on homes that had NOT lost 75% of their value.
But without selling banks were barred from issuing new loans. They were actually solvent – even profiting. But the law required them to value their reserves lower than what they were willing to sell them for and as a result they could not make any new loans.
Absent a willing buyer and a willing sellor reaching am agreement – any “price” is at best an educated guess.
Adam Smith came close to understanding this in 1776, but it is a critical foundation to economics.
and it is one of the many reasons that all other economic systems fail.
The foundation of Communism and socialism is the Labor theory of value – it is just plain FALSE
An economic system with a fundamental flaw such as the labor theory of value can not work.
Indirectly the “socialist calculation problem” which socialists lost in the 40’s and 50’s it because the labor theory of value is false, because value is subjective.
Without grasping the fact that value is subjective – you can not have a working mechanism for calculating prices – hence the socialist calculation problem.
This is also core to Coases law – provide the rule of law, and strong property rights – and bargaining produces the best possible outcome otherwise.
Claiming that Wall Street banks in 2008 were secretly ‘solvent and profiting’ is a hilarious piece of financial fiction. Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns didn’t collapse because of an accounting quirk—they went completely bankrupt because they leveraged themselves 30-to-1 on toxic, fraudulent subprime mortgages that were actively defaulting. They were saved by a multi-billion-dollar taxpayer bailout, not ‘subjective value.’
Your idea that we can’t value an asset until it’s sold completely flunks modern accounting. If you can’t value unsold property, then how do Texas and Florida manage to appraise and levy property taxes on regular people’s houses every single year? If red states can value a worker’s home without selling it, the federal government can easily value a billionaire’s luxury asset portfolio.
Screaming about Soviet bread lines and the ‘Socialist Calculation Problem’ is a massive strawman. Nobody is setting prices; we are looking at the stock market capitalization numbers billionaires use to brag about their wealth, and asking them to finally pay their fair share.
“There is no such thing as unrealized capital gains. You don’t make or lose one cent until you sell.”
That is not accurate, though I understand what you are saying. Directly, one might not “make money”, but it is an asset, and assets create money. Much of the real estate industry in NYC was created due to unrealized capital gains. That is one reason for your conclusions.
“… is it Constitutional to tax unrealized gains?” It seems so, Upstate. Everyone pays more property tax every time their government accessor raises their home’s “value”. No one has yet tested the Constitutionality of that unrealized gain.
“assessor” I just can’t type today. 🙄
JAFO, Property tax isn’t a gains tax. It’s an annual tax on value, up or down, and it’s state power, not federal. No 16th Amendment issue, no apportionment issue. Comparing it to a federal wealth tax on unrealized stock gains is comparing two different governments taxing two different things.
Property tax IS an unrealized gains tax because, just like the stock I didn’t sell, I didn’t sell my home; its so-called value was arbitrarily increased by the state. When I make improvements to my house then it’s value will (and should) increase when I sell it. At that time those gains should be calculated and taxed – not before the sale. You’re right, it’s not a 16th Amendment issue, per se. But it’s still wrong for the property owner to have little to no say when the assessor (yay I spelt it wright, har!) says it’s now worth X MORE dollars when the day before … it literally, wasn’t. 😋 I simply don’t know if that perspective has been challenged in court at any level, city, county, state, or otherwise. It would be interesting idea.
JAFO, the term that I had to look up is Ad valorem, and it just means taxed by value. Simple as that. Your county sets a value on your house, applies a rate, and that’s your bill. It goes back to English common law, long before this country existed. States have been taxing land that way since colonial times. It’s one of the oldest, most settled taxes in American law. That’s part of why it’s never been challenged as an unrealized gain. Nobody was thinking in those terms when the practice started. It just always existed.
Your real complaint still stands, though. You had zero say when the assessor decided your house was suddenly worth more. No sale happened, no check came in your mailbox, and yet the bill still shows up. That’s a legitimate grievance even if it’s not a constitutional one. Old and settled doesn’t mean fair. It just means nobody’s successfully challenged it yet.
OLLY
If you didn’t know what “ad valorem” means until you looked it up, then that is just further proof that you are talking nonsense here.
You come here almost daily with your ridiculous theories using terminology that you have invented for yourself, and which no one else with REAL knowledge understands.
“Ad valorem” is a basic fundamental term that anyone with even the most basic understanding of taxation would understand.
Recall a while ago when I corrected you on your false understanding of real property transfer taxes and the proposed replacement of the gas tax with a road usage tax in California. You waxed eloquently about the supposed ridiculous nature of these taxes, and it was quite obvious that you had no idea what you were talking about, and you had absolutely no understanding of the factual basis of these tax changes. And even worse, these taxation issues were being promulgated in your home state. When I corrected you, you admitted you were wrong.
You consistently display a lack of fundamental knowledge about the real world, and yet you post these long ridiculous diatribes that make no sense.
You are not to taken seriously in any way.
You simply lack basic knowledge about the things on which you expound at length.
This is the Dunning-Kruger Effect on steroids.
The people who know the least about a subject, invariably claim to have superior knowledge.
🤣 Not knowing a Latin term and not understanding a concept are two different things. I explained ad valorem correctly, in plain English, before anyone accused me of not knowing it. Looking up the label for something you already understand isn’t ignorance. It’s checking your terminology before you use it in public.
And I have no problem admitting when I’m wrong. That’s not a weakness. That’s how credibility works. Someone who never admits error isn’t more right, they’re just less honest about it.
Notice what you didn’t do here. You claimed a pattern of “ridiculous theories” and “long diatribes that make no sense,” but you gave one example. One. If the pattern were real, you’d have a list. You didn’t, because you don’t have one. You’re leaning on the single instance you can point to because it’s the only one you’ve got.
That’s not a rebuttal. That’s a tell.
Olly
You are living in a fantasy world of your own creation.
You have proven multiple times that you do not recognize or understand basic, universally recognized terminology, and basic concepts of taxation.
You make up your own terminology and then go on flights of fancy regarding things of which you have no solid knowledge or understanding.
You are not to be taken seriously in any way, shape, or form.
You are a living, breathing personification of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
🤦♂️Read your own reply back. Same claim as last time. Multiple times. Still zero examples. Still no list. Just louder adjectives this round: fantasy world, flights of fancy, living breathing personification. That’s not an argument getting stronger. That’s an argument with nothing behind it, dressed up to sound like more.
I’ll make this easy. Name one specific comment, one specific claim, and show where it was wrong. Not a vibe. Not a label. An actual example with my words in it. Until then you’re just repeating an insult and hoping repetition makes it true.
Olly
One of the defining features of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that those people who suffer from this affliction become defensive when they are shown to be wrong.
And usually the degree of defensiveness grows exponentially greater when the level of insight and acceptance of their deficient knowledge is at its lowest.
I need say no more.
The hallmark of Dunning-Kruger is an inability to recognize gaps in your own knowledge. That’s the actual definition, not the insult version you’re using.
When I discover I’m mistaken, I acknowledge it and revise my position. When I hit unfamiliar terminology, I look it up instead of pretending I already knew it. Those are the opposite of what Dunning-Kruger describes.
And still, three replies in, you haven’t named one specific comment or one specific claim of mine that was wrong and that I didn’t acknowledge it. Just the same label, restated with new adjectives each time. You’re citing a psychological effect you clearly haven’t read the definition of, while demonstrating none of its actual traits yourself. That’s not analysis. That’s projection with a citation attached.
I’ll leave it there. Readers can see who brought an argument and who brought an insult.
And you continue to be defensive !!!!
You can’t help yourself !!!!
You just keep making my point for me.
The more defensive you become, the more the effect is confirmed.
Olly while you are correct that taxes on property are ancient.
JAFO is also correct – the only REAL value is what a willing buyer and willing seller freely agree to. That is only known at the time of the sale.
Everything else is just a guess.
The state is not going to refund past property taxes in the event that when you do sell the value goes down. That is rare but it does happen.
Regardless all forms of wealth taxe are the worst forms of taxes there are – they are the most economically damaging.
As I noted below, once they start this tax (insert number here) -aires, at what number do they stop?
Upstate, that’s the real question. What’s the limiting factor? There isn’t one. Once wealth itself is the tax base instead of income, the number is just a dial. $100 million today. $50 million next year, like Khanna already floated. $10 million after that once the first round doesn’t bring in what they promised. There’s no principle stopping the dial from turning, only political appetite, and that only grows.
That’s the tell. A real tax policy has a stopping point rooted in something. This one doesn’t, because it was never really about revenue. It’s a redistribution scheme wearing a tax bracket as a disguise.
Upstate
Remember too X/george claims to be a GOP/Conservative.
Yet his daily tripe proves otherwise.
Dustoff, I never said or claimed to be conservative. But I am a registered Republican.
X also claimed to be a heterosexual
DustOff,
Notice how the various annonys (“Stupid comment,” everyone is Estovir, dumb question annony, etc) have not shown up today, while X has been very active?
I told X that I was going to send a female young virgin to his residence with measurements of 36-26-36, seeking to lose her virginity. And just like that, he stopped mentioning my name.
DustOff,
Notice how after I mention the usual annonys have not appeared, while X was on a comment rage, suddenly those very annonys appeared?
So you are perfectly happy with a situation where billionaires like Musk and Bezos pay less federal tax than you do.
And you are perfectly happy to defend that situation.
You’re missing the corporate tax and the taxes paid on their real assets, look at the tax revenues brought by their workers. The reason they pay less personal income tax is due to their earned income, personal income. They, like all other citizens take the best economic path to maintain their wealth. I wonder how much taxes and fees a billion dollar yacht is subject too, Registration fees and docking fees must be enormous. Let’s ask John Kerry what his Sailboat costs.
Look at the taxes and fees they pay on their businesses and real estate then get back to us.
Last year Amazon paid a corporate tax rate of 1.4%.
SpaceX paid NO corporate taxes, in 2025. They incurred massive losses.
They pay minimal property and real estate taxes. Local authorities often give them 100% exemptions to attract them to establish in their jurisdictions.
And even so, taxation by local authorities has absolutely no relevance to the fact that Musk and Bezos, the owners of the businesses, pay no significant FEDERAL taxes.
The only thing you say that is correct is that their workers pay income taxes.
SO WHAT !!!!
Those workers actually pay more income taxes than their bosses.
Musk and Bezos simply laugh all the way to the bank to take out more loans to finance their lifestyle.
It is astounding that you feel compelled to defend billionaires who pay less tax than you as a percentage of their wealth, and maybe even pay less total tax than you.
where do those Amazon workers get the money to pay all those taxes? ; )
So you are perfectly happy with the govt. stealing citizens property. What exactly makes you think that the govt. will spend others money better than the people themselves?
Stealing more money to support a bloated govt. will do way less to help the public vs. letting the likes of Musk build his business’.
Why is it greedy for me to want to keep more of what I worked hard for, but not greedy for them to want to take what they did not work for?
Goofball Anon… (‘So you are perfectly happy…’) Do the research. Musk pays $Billions in Taxes… daresay that’s ‘more’ not ‘less…’
Thank you for your comment the other day. We are dealing with fools who cannot dig below the surface. Facts are meaningless to them.
They pay less income tax because they have little earned income. They pay a lot of capital gains tax when they sell at a profit. Investments are taxed less because they are good for the economy. Yes I am fine with that because I am not an economic illiterate. If you can’t understand the system and how it works then get educated. Capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system. Socialism/Communism has plunged more people into poverty and death than any other system. But socialism/communism uses people’s innate greed to fool them, gain power and then repress people.
No Socialist country has ever been successful. Russia gave up Communism and China has moved on to Fascism, private ownership of the means of production, but with total government control to become successful. It is called quasi-capitalism.
They do not pay capital gains taxes.
They do not sell their stock.
They borrow from banks at very low interest rates using the stock as collateral. They get the monetary benefit without having to pay taxes. In fact, you are probably contributing to this situation if you have a bank account. Banks lend their depositors money to the billionaires, so the billionaires are using your money, that you have paid taxes on, to finance their lifestyle, and they pay no taxes.
You do not have the faintest idea of what is going on.
You have been suckered by the Republican Party, which is really a fully owned subsidiary of the mega-billionaires.
You are a know-nothing fool.
You have a childlike understanding of economics. Wealth generation is unlimited but money printing is supposed to only be enough for our needs for exchanges of value at the time of that need. If someone ‘hoards’ money they are losing money. If someone invests that money (what else?) they are generating wealth (hopefully) for themselves and everyone that works along with them, as everyone is self-interested and no one works for less than they’re worth.
Do you work at a dead-end job and are paid less than you’re worth? Why would anyone do that to themselves? you made that cage.
You can build all sorts of clever arguments for why seizing someone’s property is really okay this time. Doesn’t matter how clever they are. They all dodge the one question that counts. Is this a legitimate use of government power? The 16th Amendment settled that question for income. It says nothing about wealth. A wealth tax isn’t a bigger version of an income tax. It’s a different power entirely, one the states never ratified and the Framers never gave Congress.
Say they got everything anyway. Seize 100% of every fortune over $100 million. Then what? You still haven’t touched the billions bleeding out the door in fraud, waste, and abuse. That’s not a wealth problem. That’s a management problem. You don’t fix a leaking bucket by dumping more water in it.
And it’s a one-time check. You can only seize that money once. The people who built those fortunes are the same people building the companies, funding the ventures, creating the jobs. Take away the incentive to build and you don’t just lose their money. You lose what they were going to build next year, and the year after that.
So you’d wreck the engine to grab one tank of gas. Call it fair. Call it necessary. None of that makes it constitutional or smart.
define less.
2021 Historic Bill: Musk paid approximately $11 billion to $12 billion in federal and state taxes
you might want to get another accountant if your paying billions in taxes mr anon.
Olly,
Pivoting to a philosophical rant about ‘theft’ is a classic white flag when you’ve lost the math argument. You ask where the Constitution gives Congress the power to tax property after it’s bought? Try Article I, Section 8, Clause 1.
The Founders themselves passed the Federal Direct Tax of 1798 to tax accumulated wealth and property. Furthermore, every single red state in America charges an annual property tax on houses and cars bought with taxed income. Are Texas and Florida running ‘unconstitutional theft’ syndicates, or do you just only care when a tax targets a billionaire’s mega-yacht?
You’re right about one thing: process is legitimacy. And the constitutional process explicitly gives Congress the power to levy taxes under Article I, and the power to structure the judiciary under Article III. Using explicit constitutional powers to close loopholes and enact term limits isn’t a mob ripping up the rules—it’s using the text exactly as the Framers wrote it to stop an elite class from floating above the law
FYI, it was Turley who claims California has lost Trillions in wealth. Literally that’s a lie. It’s not even mathematically supportable.
If Congress already had the power to tax property and wealth under Article I, Section 8, why did the country need the 16th Amendment at all? You’re missing the apportionment piece regarding the 1789 taxing power. That’s why the Supreme Court struck down the 1894 income tax in Pollock, and why the 16th happened.
FYI, it was Turley who claims California has lost Trillions in wealth. Literally that’s a lie. It’s not even mathematically supportable.
Take it up with Turley.
You completely misunderstand why the 16th Amendment was passed. Pollock didn’t say taxing wealth was unconstitutional; it said direct taxes on property-derived income had to be apportioned by state population. The 16th Amendment was enacted simply to remove that clunky apportionment requirement for income taxes.
It did not erase Congress’s foundational Article I power to levy direct taxes. The Founders themselves passed the Federal Direct Tax of 1798 to directly tax accumulated wealth and property.Furthermore, every conservative state in America happily charges regular people an annual property tax on houses and cars bought with taxed income. If taxing already-purchased property is ‘constitutional’ when Texas takes money from a homeowner, it is fully constitutional under Article I if Congress decides to close loops and levy a luxury property tax on a billionaire’s yacht collection. Try reading the actual legal history instead of just skimming the headlines.
If a federal wealth tax is classified as a direct tax, as many constitutional scholars argue, Article I, Section 9 would require it to be apportioned among the states by population. The 16th Amendment removed that requirement only for taxes on income, not for other direct taxes. Whether a modern wealth tax counts as a “direct tax” has never been definitively resolved by the Supreme Court.
The 1798 Direct Tax doesn’t help your case either. That tax was apportioned by state population, exactly as Article I required. Congress didn’t skip that step because it didn’t need to.
Texas and Florida charging property tax proves nothing about federal power. States aren’t bound by Article I, Section 9. That clause restrains Congress, not state legislatures.
Try reading Article I, Section 9 next to the 16th Amendment instead of skimming past the parts that don’t help you.
X again reading is not your forte.
Artricle I section 8 Clause one gives conbgress the power to “To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises”
That does not include wealth or income taxes.
Further A1 S2 explicitly requires that taxes must be approtioned by the number of people. This prohibits income and wealth taxes. This is the reason that the 16th amendment was passed
The 16th amendment removes the direct apportionment requirement for ONLY income taxes. Federal “Wealth” taxes are not constitutional. .
The 1798 Tax was specifically apportioned to each state by population – as required. While DESCRIBED as a property tax it was in reality a HEAD TAX which is constitutional.
Absolutely states have property taxes – The majority of the constitution regards the powers of the FEDERAL govenrment – not the states.
Calling the Federal Direct Tax of 1798 a ‘head tax’ is a complete hallucination. A head tax charges every person the exact same amount. The 1798 law did the exact opposite: it levied a progressive tax based entirely on the assessed market value of a person’s luxury homes and land. If you were poor, you paid nothing; if you were a wealthy elite, you were heavily taxed on your assets. That is a wealth tax, period.
By admitting that this tax was legal because it followed Article I apportionment rules, you just completely blew up your own argument. You just admitted that Congress has the foundational constitutional power to tax wealth and property.
The 16th Amendment didn’t erase Article I; it just made income taxes easier to run without the clunky apportionment math. If Congress passes an apportioned wealth tax on fortunes over $50 million, or if the courts classify it as an excise tax on hoarded capital, it is 100% constitutional. Stop inventing fake legal history to protect billionaire private equity loopholes.
You seem to be under the delusion that every clause int he constitution universally applies to the federal government and the states.
Article I Section 8 Clause 1 which you cite without reading is about the powers of CONGRESS – not the states.
The constitution does give the federal government the power to levy taxes – specifically the section you cite, But those taxes MUST be apportioned among the states by population. It is right there in the text.
Yes the constitution gives congress the power to structure the judiciary. Article III explicitly notes that all article III judges hold their office during good behavior.
Once appointed – you can impeach them. But you can not otherwise remove them.
If you want term limits on article III judges you must amend the constitution.
The same is true for federal elected offices – which is why the 22nd amendment was passed.
I am not opposed to term limits – but you must amend the constitution to do so.
That BTW is both wise and important. Amending the constitution is far harder than legislating – and deliberately so – USUALLY this prevents us from doing something stupid , or even when what we do is not inherently stupid, not thinking it out fully.
There is broad political support for term limits. But that does not means that the people would support each party gaming term limits – as they could do it they were legislated to partisan advantage.
It is much harder to gain partisan advantage through a constitutional amendment.
It’s hilarious watching you lecture me on reading when you don’t even understand the legal terms you’re copying and pasting.First, by admitting Congress can levy direct taxes via apportionment, you just admitted a federal wealth tax is fully constitutional under Article I. If lawmakers structure a tax on fortunes over $50 million using that formula, it is completely valid.
Second, your claim that judicial term limits require a constitutional amendment completely flunks statutory law. Modern term-limit bills don’t fire justices or strip their life tenure. They use the Senior Status framework—a system created entirely by an act of Congress in 1919—to transition justices off active panels after 18 years while keeping their salary and commission for life.
Congress has legally altered the court’s size and structure six times in history. Using explicit Article I and Article III powers to stop a rogue judicial minority from hijacking the rule of law isn’t ‘gaming the system’—it’s using the Constitution exactly as it was written. Try proofreading your legal theories before posting them next time.
“FYI, it was Turley who claims California has lost Trillions in wealth. Literally that’s a lie. It’s not even mathematically supportable.”
Of course they have – and that is Trivially possible. Musk alone has moved himself and many of his businesses from CA to TX or elsewhere – and he is not alone.
It is not merely mathematically possible that CA lost trillions in wealth it is trivially provable.
Saying a ‘trillions of dollars loss’ is trivially provable because Elon Musk moved to Texas is absolutely hilarious. You are completely confusing a billionaire’s personal stock portfolio with a state’s macroeconomic reality.
When Musk moved his address, he didn’t pack the massive Fremont Tesla factory or the Hawthorne SpaceX facility into a suitcase. The manufacturing hubs, the advanced engineering talent, and the thousands of high-paying jobs stayed right here. California still taxes every single dollar of business revenue these companies generate inside its borders.
Think about the basic math for two seconds: California’s entire annual GDP is $4.3 trillion. If the state actually lost ‘trillions’ in wealth flight, its economy would be completely wiped out. Instead, California’s booming tech sector just generated a $4.5 billion budget surplus and built a $28.8 billion rainy day fund. Elon Musk buying a house in Texas didn’t break California’s economy; it just broke your ability to do basic math.
You seem to think shifting an executive office to Austin shields a company from California taxes. It doesn’t. Under California tax law, any revenue generated from sales, services, or operations within California borders remains 100% subject to California corporate and income taxes. Elon Musk can sleep in Texas all he wants; Tesla and SpaceX still pay for the massive chunk of the market they occupy in California.
It is trivially provable that John Say is profoundly mentally impaired.
It is trivially provable that he simply makes stuff up and gets his information from the voices in his head.
It is trivially provable that he posts entirely fact free comments.
It is trivially provable that California GDP has increased every year for the last 16 straight years.
It is trivially provable that in 2025, California GDP grew by 5%.
It is trivially provable that California cannot possibly be losing wealth, let alone TRILLIONS in wealth.
It is trivially provable that California’s GDP stands at $4.5 trillion and has increased every year for 16 years.
It is trivially provable that even if California had lost even ONE trillion in wealth, rather than MULTIPLE trillions as claimed, then there would have been a 25% reduction in GDP.
It is trivially provable that California is the economic powerhouse of the United States, without which the country would be in much worse economic shape.
It is trivially provable that Turley and John Say are liars.
Anon, does the GDP include services, public employees? Explain the GDP.
While you blatantly misread the constitution – If your claims were correct – Why were the 16th and 22nd amendments passed ?
Your claims regarding the constitution – make those amendments unnecessary and redundant.
T%hat said aside from the constitution – both simple logic and real world experience demonstrate that Wealth taxes are the absolutely stupidiest and most destructive taxes there are
The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes:
Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks
By Christina D. Romer and David H. Romer
Our estimates suggest that a tax increase of 1 percent
of GDP reduces output over the next three years by nearly three percent. The effect is highly
statistically significant.
Christina Duckworth Romer is the Class of 1957 Garff B. Wilson Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley and a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers in the Obama administration.
Why do taxes reduce output ? Because they negatively impact investment.
Wealth taxes are the most destructive – because nearly all wealth is invested.
Corporate taxes are the next worse – all corporate taxes are double taxation, and worse taxes on successful investment.
Capital gains taxes are the next most damaging – again these are a tax on successful investment.
Income taxes are next followed by tariffs and sales taxes.
There is a massive amount of work done on Taxes, the above is just ONE study done by the Romers.
There are hundreds of them. The Romer study above and the conclusion I cited are an even LARGER negative impact than I typically cite – the data I typically cite – the result of myriads of studies is that for every 10% of GDP spent by govenrment growth reduces by 1%
While the Romers deal with Taxes rather than Spending – though they are related. And they deal with TOTAL GDP not percent changes – they get a much larger negative impact than most.
Absolutely as has been addressed in other posts – the impact of taxes is on a curve – not linear as my 10%/1% cite or the romers 1%/3% cite.
But the rates of taxation across the OECD which is the normal data base for economic studies ranges from Government at 20% of GDP to government at 80% of GDP.
With nearly all data clustered in the middle.
We KNOW from 19th century data – that the point at which govenrment spending transitions from NET negative to net positive is below 8% of GDP – that was the data point set by Lincoln during the Civil War.
I specifically cite Romer, Barro, Rogoff and reinhart becausew these are Keynesians or Neo-Keynesians – they are from places like Harvard and Berkley – not Chicago.
They are among the most credible economists ON THE LEFT – as noted Christine Romer was Obama’s Cheif Economic Advisor – She is not an austrian, or chicago school or supply sider or anmy of the actually far more reputable economists. None of the left wing economists above have ever won a Nobel Prize – those go to OIstom, Buchanon, Freidman, Hayek, Acemoglu and myriads of other nobel winning economists you would call “right wing”
The FACT is not only is the nonsense you are shilling unconstitutional but it is incredibly stupid.
So stupd that not only do nearly Nobel winning economists think it is stupid, but that event the semi sane economists on the left recognize that the DATA prety universally condemns this nonsense as STUPID.
I have cited ONE paper by Romer and Romer above – But the data on the negative impact of taxes and the economic studies are very close to universally damning.
This nonsense DOES NOT WORK – it is not supported by logic or commonsense. and only a tiny number of piss poorly done studies by the worst economists have ever found otherwise.
You are howling at the moon crazy,
Don;’t do things we KNOW will fail – should be a bipartisan matter.
Imagine calling everyone else ‘crazy’ while completely misrepresenting the economist you are trying to quote. Christina Romer—the very author of the study you copy-and-pasted—explicitly endorsed progressive wealth taxes, completely debunking your attempt to weaponize her data to protect billionaire fortunes.
Your trickle-down fairy tale was already field-tested in the real world during the catastrophic Kansas tax cuts. They slashed top tax rates using your exact logic, and it instantly cratered their economy, destroyed school funding, and created zero jobs until the legislature panicked and repealed it.
Cutting taxes for the ultra-rich doesn’t spark investment; it just funds billionaire welfare, like Kevin O’Leary demanding working-class tax subsidies to build his private data centers. Closing loopholes like the carried interest loophole isn’t ‘destroying output’—it’s stopping a rigged elite class from freeloading off the public infrastructure that regular taxpayers have to pay for. Try reading the actual conclusions of your sources before trying to lecture the page.
Your argument that the 16th and 22nd amendments make my constitutional points “redundant” flunks basic legal history.
As established, the 16th Amendment was passed because the Pollock ruling created a logistical calculation nightmare regarding apportionment for income derived from property. It didn’t grant a new power; it simplified an existing one.
If Congress decides to structure a wealth tax using an apportionment formula under its original Article I, Section 8 authority, or if the courts rule it a localized excise tax, it is fully constitutional. You don’t need a new amendment to do something the original text already allows.
The 1798 tax was properly apportioned among the states as the portion of the constitution that you cite requires by population.
Thank you for completely winning the argument for me. By admitting that the Federal Direct Tax of 1798 was legal because it followed Article I apportionment rules, you just admitted that a federal wealth tax is fully constitutional.
If modern lawmakers structure a marginal tax on fortunes over $50 million using that exact same apportionment formula, or if the courts classify it as an excise tax on hoarded capital, it is 100% legal under Article I. The 16th Amendment didn’t wipe out the original Constitution; it just made income taxes easier to run without the clunky math.
The Founders used their explicit constitutional powers to levy progressive taxes on unsold luxury property and land. If taxing assets without a sale is a legitimate legal reality for middle-class homeowners every single year, it is fully legitimate for billionaires. Stop inventing fake legal history to protect an elite class that uses the carried interest loophole to pay lower rates than a schoolteacher while leeching off public subsidies. You just proved your own side wrong.
California really lost that much.
No, it didn’t.
You want proof? Let’s look at the actual official IRS taxpayer migration data. The IRS records show that California lost a net $11.9 billion in taxable income to outbound migration.
For those who flunked basic math, $11.9 billion is roughly 1% of a single trillion. To claim the state lost ‘trillions’ is a flat-out lie that misses the real data by a factor of one hundred.
Think about it: California’s entire annual GDP is $4.3 trillion. If it actually lost ‘trillions,’ the state would be completely bankrupt. Instead, the Silicon Valley tech boom is generating so much wealth that the state just logged a $4.5 billion budget surplus and built a $28.8 billion rainy day reserve. Executives buying vacation homes in Miami doesn’t change the macroeconomic reality. The proof is in the ledger, and Turley completely failed the calculator test.
Democrazis
The New Green – as in envy – Deal, a redistributive change scheme.
Well, well, well.
The Reflecting Pool has just been drained again.
There is absolutely no sign of the 300 foot gash that vandals supposedly made to sabotage the project.
But there is a sign of significant damage. There are tire tracks in the coating that run the full length of the pool. These were caused by Trump’s motorcade when he insisted on driving the length of the pool to inspect the work that had been done.
The DOJ has filed felony charges against a former Olympian rower for supposedly vandalizing the pool. He faces 10 years in prison.
Looks like Trump actually caused the damage, so I presume the DOJ will be filing similar felony charges of destruction of federal property against him as well.
That comment is very much like what the Babylon Bee does with Fake News fiction, “Fake News You Can Trust”. At least the Babylon Bee’s fiction is honest and let’s everyone know that it’s all just a joke, Anonymous’ fiction not so much.
Everything I said is true.
Photos viewable online show NO evidence of a 300foot gash.
But there is clear evidence of tire tracks in the pool coating, that run the full length of the pool.
Anonymous wrote, “Everything I said is true.”
LIAR!
Where’s the 350ft gash Steve? Trump lied. As he always does.
I have no idea what Trump said – and I would never trust you to report that accurately.
Further – I do not care what Trump said.
Park Police have caught many people damaging the reflecting pool and other national monuments on security video.
Further the damage – millions of dollars worth throughout the mall is self evident.
In the case of the Olympian – he was ordered to stop – he refused, and was arrested by National Park Police, then a DC grand jury indicted him.
Trump mis-stated the extent of the damage – is not a defense to the crime of vandalism.
It is irrelevant if Trump said the gash went to the moon.
This person is lucky he is facing a DC jury and judges – he may get off, if not he likely will get an inconsequential sentence.
Mostly that is not important – except as a deterent.
What is far more important is that left wing nuts did millions of dollars of damage to not just the reflecting pool – but monuments all over DC leading up to the 4th.
Some were caught – most were not – but caught or not they are vile people who would destroy public property and try to ruin patriotic events for the rest of us.
When someone shows you who they are
believe them the first time.
John say, you’re a bad liar.
“ I have no idea what Trump said – and I would never trust you to report that accurately.
Further – I do not care what Trump said.
Park Police have caught many people damaging the reflecting pool and other national monuments on security video.”
If you have no idea what he said why are you admitting what he said?
“ Trump mis-stated the extent of the damage – is not a defense to the crime of vandalism.
It is irrelevant if Trump said the gash went to the moon.”
The Olympian only touched a floating piece of peeled paint. That’s not a crime. His case is going to be dismissed.
“ What is far more important is that left wing nuts did millions of dollars of damage to not just the reflecting pool – but monuments all over DC leading up to the 4th.“
Is that a deflection from the incompetence of Trump’s reflecting pool fiasco? Indeed it is.
Jeanine Pirro who has the unenviable distinction of having the record of most no-billed grand jury findings is not going to succeed. The charges are so stupid even a conservative jury would find him not guilty.
X wrote, “Where’s the 350ft gash Steve?”
Why the heck are you asking me?
I don’t have a friggin clue if the “gash” exists and I never made any claims anywhere, at any time, that the “gash” does or doesn’t exist.
X wrote, “Trump lied.”
Neither you or I have proof that Trump lied about the “gash” in the reflecting pool. It’s quite likely that he read a report about the reflecting pool and then extrapolated that to absurdity, he does all the time, and that pattern is annoying as hell.
So knowing that bias makes people stupid and only morons and fools make assertions that they cannot support, are you asserting that the “gash” doesn’t exist?
X wrote, “As he always does.”
That sir is a matter of opinion.
Here’s how it the definition of lie seems to work in relation to Trump and the political left; Trump spoke, therefore Trump lied and that is the extent of critical thinking for the anti-USA sociommunists morons occupying the 21st century Democratic Party.
Trump made a claim someone cut a 350 ft gash on the liner. The drained pool shows no such thing. Trump lied. He’s a well known liar. It’s as simple as it gets.
X,
I wrote my reply to you above in plain English, please stop reading it in dumbass.
Go troll another blog.
First – why would anyone beleive you – what have you ever told the truth about.
That said – Tires might leave tracks on the coating of a concrete pool. They are not likely to damage it. Rubber is not sharp and relatively even steady pressure does not damage coatings. The weigh of tires on the coating of the reflecting pool is a little more than double the weight of the water in the reflecting pool when it is filled.
What you have said is misleading – and probably not true either.
Regardless if you do not wish to risk 10 years in jail – do not vandalize national monuments. There was MASSIVE amounts of vandalism – not just of the reflecting pool – but throughout DC prior to the 4th.
Mostly done by left wing nuts. Those caught should expect consequences. Your hatred of Trump does not justify damage to property that is not yours.
Nor is there a “But Trump ….” Defense. Nor an I only did a little bit of damage defense.
If you do not wish to risk jail – do not engage in vandalism.
Changing the subject…. hmm, must distract when faced with a topic I can’t defend
Multiple people have been charged. Further they were indicted by Grand Juries in DC and will be prosecuted in DC.
Just getting an indictment against someone on the left in DC is a miracle and establishes that the evidence must be pretty damning.
Regardless, The Trump DOJ did not indict these people – a Grand Jury of citizens from DC did so based on the evidence.
It is highly unlikely that Rubber tires are going to cut a coating on a Concrete pool. But yet they MIGHT leave tracks.
A typical car tire exerts about 30psi on the ground. A high heel is nearly 500 psi.
The olympian rower was warned multiple times and caught in the act on video.
Regardless he is fortunate his charges will be decided by a DC jury and DC judges. If convicted he will get a slapp on the wrists – Unless he is a member of the proud boys or oath keepers – then he is SOL.
Driving on barely cured cheap paint WILL damage it. Turns out Trump’s incompetence struck again.
Obama spent 35 million on the reflecting pool. What was done?
First it was a billionaire tax.
Now it is anyone making $50m or more!
Soon, it will be $10m!
The millionaire next door is getting a little nervous.
Then $5m!
Around this point, the millionaire next door is starting to get real nervous.
But the mob has tasted the blood and wants MORE!
The politicians who created this monster will have to appease the monster or get voted out as we saw in NYC and CO.