wanye on X - "People sort of act like they live in a fairytale in which there’s a group of privileged land owners and then on the other hand the peasants who have been locked out. But in our country what happens is we buy land with money. You aren’t granted the privilege to use it. You buy it with money, like everything else. And the title transfers. You can save up some money and go buy some land yourself. High housing prices, notwithstanding, very large shares of the country are still homeowners. It’s not like this is an extreme minority group."
Coddled Affluent Professional on X - "The downwardly mobile NGO DSA creative leftist blob is self aware enough to bang the drum about ‘billionaires’ but if you pay careful attention it’s obvious a great deal of their rage and antipathy is based on lifestyle envy and directed at the kulaks and petty bourgeoisie who they believe are responsible for the humiliating constraints imposed by their downwardly mobile lifestyles (e.g. ‘affordability’). They find it endlessly upsetting to have to pay rent and property owners and landlords inspire rage even if it’s just some working class guy who scraped together enough to buy a modest multi-family unit and does all the maintenance himself more or less as a second job. The desire to force maximal extraction from property owners is based primarily on self-entitlement and aggrievement and the purpose of these ‘politics’ is to launder these resentments as something more lofty and justified. The meta narrative of all of this ideological programming is that there needs to be redistribution TO affluent people who are disappointed with life FROM people of very often modest means who have managed to organize their lives in a more economically purposeful manner."
Arthur MacWaters on X - "population has grown ~9x in 200yrs, while poverty trends to 0. people act as though capitalism is a zero sum game, but it’s actually the only system that creates positive sum outcomes. the average person today is far richer than most kings in days past"
Thread by @aledeniz on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "When I tell this story, all Americans ๐บ๐ธ and most British ๐ฌ๐ง don’t believe me.
Italy ๐ฎ๐น cannot have startups by design. This is due many items, starting with the untranslable “studio di settore”. The ๐ฎ๐น tax authorities assume that given x company assets you MUST make a profit
Say you are a brilliant ๐ฎ๐น Italian who thinks they can create the new Ozempic in 10 years, and you manage to find the investors to back you up. You buy computers, lab equipment, you hire people. The day after the 3rd year the๐ฎ๐น tax agency will knock at your door. The ๐ฎ๐น tax agency will ask you to pay taxes for the next year – 13 months before the fiscal year close – and you will have to pay more than their “studio di settore” assumes based on your capital investment. You can refuse, against your accountant advise. The ๐ฎ๐น tax authorities will send an army of uniformed officers who will pour through every single pore of your company. Every real work will be stopped for at least 2 months while looking for displaced mice – in my case I lost a week looking for a misplaced 5¼-inch floppy. This will be repeated every single year you dare not to pay taxes on their assumed profit, while exposing you to a literally uncountable amount of fines. It is basically impossible to startup a high value added business, unless the revenue stream can be started straight away.
I focused on startups because that was my experience, but @gbponz is absolutely right here: the double whammy of being taxed on a function of our capital investments and having to pay taxes 1 year ahead makes _all_ cyclical business unsustainable long term...
Employees excluded, almost everyone in a Italy pays 100% of their estimated taxes 1 month before the 1st revenue of the year – 13 months before the end of the fiscal year. In fact they pay at least 40% 6 months before the 1st revenue – 18 months before year’s end...
The 5¼-inch floppy story: an officer noticed a book with an included floppy. He asked why the floppy serial was not in our inventory and its whereabouts. I spent 1 week to locate it. We didn’t even have 5¼-inch readers. We had to amend our inventory to include it to avoid a fine...
the tax agency is currently mailing all SMEs they suspect have not faithfully declared their revenues – they also offer you heavy discounts on the taxes you didn’t pay in 2018-2022. They discounts depend from your ISA rating. E.g. if you have got a 10 in your ISA it will allow you to pay them not to investigate you for 2018-2022 if you pay taxes on 5% of the assumed revenue. It is a very good deal, I am pretty sure it will be taken by lot of companies who did pay their taxes in full as risk avoidance. But even if you got a 3 they will still halve your taxes. They allow you to pay in instalments, pre approved, 24 monthly payments at 2% interest. It’s sheer madness all around, the system heavily reward and incentivise tax dodgers."
Giovanni B. Ponzetto - ๐จ๐ฆ๐ฎ๐ฑ on X - "Alessandro is wrong here: It's not that Italy cannot have startups. It cannot have COMPANIES, since any time there is a "revenue wobblyness", companies end up in tax arrears since in the magical world of italian politics companies ALWAYS earn the same or more than the year before. Startups are only a subset. Proof comes from the fact that even in "normal" sectors, the number of new companies is not enough to keep the activity level stable going forward, since new companies even in better enviroments rarely last three years."
Pope Leo XIV on X - "Hundreds of millions of people throughout the world are immersed in extreme poverty. Yet, disproportionate wealth remains in the hands of a few. It is an unjust scenario, in the face of which we cannot fail to question ourselves and commit to change things. There is no lack of resources at the root of disparities, but the need to address solvable problems related to a more equitable distribution of wealth, to be achieved with moral sense and honesty."
The Mad Ox on X - "Your Holiness, that sounds noble, until we remember history. The Catholic Church has spent over a century condemning socialism as incompatible with human dignity, private property, and the Gospel. Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum called the socialist seizure of goods 'utterly rejected' and contrary to natural rights. Pius XI declared no one can be 'a good Catholic and a true socialist.' Yet here we are with vague calls for redistribution that echo every failed leftist experiment: envy dressed as justice, zero-sum thinking that shrinks the pie instead of growing it. Extreme poverty hasn't been 'solved' by moral exhortations from pulpits or politicians, it's been crushed by free markets, property rights, innovation, and trade. Since 1990, capitalism lifted over a billion people out of destitution worldwide. Billions more escaped through the very systems you and your predecessor love to call an 'economy that kills' or a 'dictatorship.' Meanwhile, every socialist paradise, from the Soviet Union to Venezuela to Mao's China, delivered mass graves, bread lines, and gulags while the ruling elite lived in actual bubbles of luxury. The irony is blinding. The Vatican sits on billions in art, real estate, gold, and investments, priceless treasures hoarded while lecturing the world on sharing. If 'equitable distribution' is so urgent and 'solvable,' why not lead by example? Sell the Sistine Chapel frescoes, auction the papal jewels, liquidate the papal investments, and wire the proceeds to the poor. Practice what you preach instead of demanding others (especially productive taxpayers and entrepreneurs) fund your vision through coercive state power. Christianity calls for personal charity, voluntary sacrifice, hard work, and subsidiarity, not class warfare, centralized planning, or the state as savior. 'Those who don't work shouldn't eat' (2 Thessalonians 3:10). The preferential option for the poor is real, but it doesn't mean turning the Church into a mouthpiece for failed 20th-century ideologies that have killed more people than any other in history. Focus on saving souls, not engineering outcomes. The road to hell is paved with 'equitable' intentions, and the Vatican has no divine right to pave it for the rest of us."
Bono Is Still Trying to Figure Out U2 and Himself - The New York Times - "I ended up as an activist in a very different place from where I started. I thought that if we just redistributed resources, then we could solve every problem. I now know that’s not true. There’s a funny moment when you realize that as an activist: The off-ramp out of extreme poverty is, ugh, commerce, it’s entrepreneurial capitalism. I spend a lot of time in countries all over Africa, and they’re like, Eh, we wouldn’t mind a little more globalization actually... globalization has brought more people out of poverty than any other -ism. If somebody comes to me with a better idea, I’ll sign up. I didn’t grow up to like the idea that we’ve made heroes out of businesspeople, but if you’re bringing jobs to a community and treating people well, then you are a hero. That’s where I’ve ended up. God spare us from lyricists who quote themselves, but if I wrote only one lyric that was any good, it might have been: Choose your enemies carefully because they will define you. Turning the establishment into the enemy — it’s a little easy, isn’t it?... I believe [Bush] was convinced that invading Iraq was the right thing to do, and I perhaps made an overstatement on his behalf. But it is Shakespearean to observe, as I have at first hand, his paintings of wounded warriors. I’ve seen their vulnerability screaming at him off the canvas. I think he was sincere about his intentions, albeit, in my view, ill conceived. What I object to is the easy caricature of thinking that it was done for the oil, the enrichment of his friends down at the golf club. I don’t think George Bush gives a [expletive] about his friends down at the golf club.
N.Y. State will allocate $1.5B to help address NYC fiscal challenges : r/newyork - "Alt headline: NYC gets to keep a teensy bit more of its tax revenue this year."
Left wingers go on about empathy, bash right wingers for being selfish and want to import the entire third world and put them all on welfare. But people in the same state shouldn't get any money
Trump Didn't Deserve to Win, But We Deserved to Lose - "I write this to you from New York City, where we are governed by Democrats and we pay the highest taxes in the country, but that doesn’t mean we receive the best government services. Our transportation agencies are black holes for money, unable to deliver on their capital plans despite repeated increases in the dedicated taxes that fund them, because it costs four times as much per mile to build a subway line here as it does in France, and because union rules force the agency to overstaff itself, inflating operating costs. Half of bus riders don’t pay the fare, and MTA employees don’t try to make them. Emotionally-disturbed homeless people camp out on the transit system — the other day, I was on an M34 bus where one shouted repeatedly at another passenger that he was a “faggot” — and even though police are all over the place (at great taxpayer expense) they don’t do much about it, and I can’t entirely blame them since our government lacks the legal authority to keep these people either in jail or in treatment. The city cannot stop people from shoplifting, so most of the merchandise at Duane Reade is in locked cabinets. A judge recently said the city can’t even padlock the illegal cannabis stores that have popped up all over the place — that’s apparently unconstitutional, and so years into what was supposed to be the wokest legal cannabis regime in the country, our government still can’t figure out how to make sure people who sell weed have a license to do so, even though they’ve done that with regard to alcohol forever. Ever since the COVID shutdowns, Democrats here have stopped talking very much about the importance of investing in public education, but the schools remain really expensive for taxpayers even as families move away, enrollment declines, and chronic absenteeism remains elevated. Currently, we are under state court order to spend billions of our dollars to house migrants in Midtown hotels that once housed tourists and business travelers. Housing costs are insane because the city makes it very hard to build anything — and it’s really expensive to travel here, partly because so many hotels are now full of migrants, and partly because the city council literally made it illegal to build new hotels. And as a result of all of this, we are shedding population — we’re probably going to lose three more congressional districts in the next reapportionment. And where are people moving to? To Sun Belt states, mostly run by Republicans, where it is possible to build housing and grow the economy. Meanwhile, the voters of New York have just adopted an equal rights amendment to the state constitution, which was put on the ballot by the Democrat-controlled state legislature. One effect of this amendment is to create a state constitutional right to abortion. Of course, abortion was already legal in New York, and a state constitutional provision will not override any new federal laws or regulations that Republicans might impose with their new control in Washington. This is exactly the sort of braindead symbolism that exemplifies the Democrats who rule our state: they pat themselves on the back for a formalistic, legal declaration of the rights of the people who live here, and meanwhile, people of all races and identities flee New York for other, officially less “inclusive” places where they can actually afford a decent quality of life. I am unfortunately a Democrat, but as someone who lives in a place that is governed very badly by Democrats, I can easily understand why “can you imagine what incompetent, lunatic shit those people will do if they get control of the government?” would fall flat as an argument against Republicans. It doesn’t surprise me that the very largest swings away from Democrats in this post-COVID, post-George Floyd, post-inflation election occurred in blue states. The gap between Democrats’ promise of better living through better government and their failure to actually deliver better government has been a national political problem. So when Republicans made a pitch for change from all this (or even burn-it-all-down), it didn’t fall flat... here is the Democratic nominee, bowing to pressure from The Groups to look for ways to spend your tax dollars on the most bespoke concern of a criminal, or of a non-citizen who isn’t even supposed to be here, before thinking about you and your interests. And all of this is why I think Democrats’ approach to the cost-of-living issues that have dominated this campaign has fallen so flat. The Democratic argument is, more or less, “look at all my programs” — all the things I’m going to have the government do to make life easier for you... I think Americans look around at how it goes when the government actually tries to help, and they have a healthy skepticism about how helpful the government is really going to be, and about whether the benefits are really going to flow to them. Democrats are making too many promises; they instead need to pick a few things for the government to do really well, with a focus on benefits to the broad public rather than to the people being paid to provide the services, instead of trying to do a zillion different things and doing them badly at great expense, as was the approach with the moribund Build Back Better Act.
Time to mock poor people for voting against their interests, because if you turn down "free" stuff, you're an idiot, even if you know that growing the national debt even more is a bad idea and that what you will get is not going to be to your tastes
Terence Corcoran: Excrementalism — Cory Doctorow is totally full of it - "When the book came out last year, the CBC ran a chummy interview with host Ian Hanomansing, who opened with a softball question that allowed Doctorow to start off with one of his usual bits of misleading data and analysis designed to portray the tech billionaires as dinosaurs devouring our lives. “I am worried,” said Doctorow, “that seven companies make up 30 per cent of the American stock market.” And with that he introduced classic leftist bits of phoney data and commentary to support the pop-economics theory that we live in an economy dominated by corrupt, gouging monopolists. First of all, the total value of the stock market is not a meaningful base for measuring economic activity, nor is the total market value of the tech giants of much use. Big Tech shares may today be valued at US$20 trillion, or about 30 per cent of the $60-trillion market cap of the S&P 500. But the big number is based on market speculation, not reality. As Doctorow observed, their stock prices could disappear in a tech market crash. In terms of economic activity the seven tech firms produced total revenue last year of around $3 trillion, or about 10 per cent of total revenue of all S&P 500 listed firms. As for profits, the estimated $600-billion net income of the techs in 2025 is equal to about four per cent of all corporate profits across the U.S. economy and only about 2.8 per cent of total tech market capitalization. The point is that Doctorow uses simplistic number grabs and economic manipulations to hype his monopoly message, a tactic he deploys throughout his book. No real data is offered to support economic and commercial claims, nor does he produce any credible research to justify his bonkers leftist economic arguments. Speaking about tech billionaires on the CBC, Doctorow said, “the worst people with the worst ideas make the most money.” At Google and Amazon and Meta, the monopolists leave consumers with no choice and no economic freedom. “You’re not going to shop your way out of a monopoly.” On the victimized socialist left, which is where Doctorow is parked, the definition of competitive capitalism is one word: monopoly. The literal and proper definition of monopoly is “one seller.” For his purposes, Doctorow adopts the ideas of economic theorists who claim that three, four or five corporations combined could achieve “market power” that would be equivalent to that of a single-seller monopoly. He writes in his book, a “monopoly is an economic system in which markets are dominated by powerful sellers,” including “cartels” of three or four corporations that appear to be competing but are in fact monopolists. One of Doctorow’s leading monopolist examples is Amazon. Every aspect of Jeff Bezos’ massively successful consumer supply system is portrayed as an abuse of consumers and of the corporations whose products are sold via Amazon. One of the opening chapters in his book is excerpted from a Doctorow blog post from 2022: “How monopoly enshittified Amazon: Chokepoint Capitalism ruins everything.” Doctorow’s economic ideas boil down to a core principle: Capitalism equals monopoly equals economic devastation for people... Doctorow’s Enshittification book — a relatively small production with fewer words per page than usual — is available for a relatively high price of $42 on Amazon. So far, though, Doctorow has not accused Amazon of turning his book into an example of Big Tech capitalist exploitation."
KOMO News on X - "Across the country, at least ten states, including Washington, are now exploring or have already passed an exit or wealth tax to combat revenue losses from residents fleeing to lower tax areas"
Councilwoman Vickie Paladino on X - "And so the economic Berlin Wall goes up. This is where socialism always leads — restricting freedom of movement. And doing so in increasingly draconian ways. Because when given a choice, people will always choose to leave a socialist state. So the socialists will have to resort to progressively harsher measures to prevent people and capital from fleeing their failed experiment. This is nothing new. Every socialist government from the Soviet Union to East Germany to North Korea to Cuba to China has had to place severe restrictions to prevent their population from simply walking away. And now as Democrat states dig deeper and deeper into this same discredited ideology, they will have to construct barriers to restrict people from exercising their freedom to walk away. Today its ‘exit taxes’ — and what comes next will be far worse."
Hundreds of Colorado business leaders call for action as nearly 100 companies leave the state - "Colorado is losing businesses and jobs at an alarming rate. Now, the ones who've stuck around are calling on state leaders to make changes before things get even worse. The Colorado Chamber of Commerce has been sounding an alarm for years about excessive regulation and, last year, more people moved out of Colorado than into the state... While U.S. News & World Report found Colorado is the 11th best state for business -- down from fourth best in 2022 -- a study commissioned by the Colorado chamber found we are also the sixth most regulated state. Polis says he's in favor of reviewing regulations. "The lack of predictability is absolutely a problem -- not knowing what comes next. I think it speaks to more than just the legislature. It goes to the fact that people can put things on the ballot and sometimes they can pass," the governor said. A bill led by the chamber and supported by the governor will require state agencies review their rules and regulations every five years and do a cost-benefit analysis. The chamber says 45% of state regulations are duplicative or redundant. The letter recommends a "thorough and honest assessment" of all factors impacting competitiveness... The governor and Caruso say that starts with changing the rhetoric coming from some Democratic lawmakers. "Every time I look at a Twitter (X) post, one of our -- and I know they're just following their party line, but it's like ... when tech leaders see that and they're trying to figure out where do we want to invest? Where do we want to be? They just cross Colorado off the list," Caruso said."
Daniel Turner on X - "They fled blue California for red Colorado. But they voted blue. And turned Colorado blue. So they will flee blue Colorado and head to red Idaho, Utah, and Wyoming. And do it all over again. See: Connecticut. New Hampshire. Georgia."
State Leadership Initiative on X - "20 years ago Colorado was a Red state and thriving. 10 years ago liberals were writing pieces about how Colorado was the next Silicon Valley. Now it's an economic backwater. An omen for what happens when Red states go blue."
Don't California My... - "As time goes on, more and more cars are adorned with these bumper stickers, a warning against the importation of destructive ideas taking over their home, but what happens when a Red state goes blue? We now have two examples of what the collapse and destruction will look like: Colorado and, as of 2025, Virginia. Following the new blue trifecta in Virginia, we see an opening into the game plan. Run as moderates and rule as radicals. Within the few months of taking power, the Virginia legislature has proposed a litany of insane and destructive policies that would ruin the state. They’ve proposed minimum sentence removals for rape, murder, and child porn production and distribution; a ban on assault rifle purchases; a ban on handguns in cars (lawmakers are exempt, of course); tax increases; redistricting to ensure they never lose another election; mandatory race-based discrimination in state contracts; and much more. None of this is particularly surprising given that the attorney general still won his race after being exposed for fantasizing over murdering Republican children, but what does this mean for the future of Virginia? What will Virginia look like in 10 years’ time? The answer is Colorado. Just over twenty years ago, Colorado had its last Republican governor. Since then it has been a stronghold of leftist policy, endlessly importing out-of-state voters to calcify its left-wing government. Back when Democrats first took control, Colorado was one of the most desirable states to live in; it was listed in all sorts of magazines and featured across TV. Fortune 500 companies were sprinting to Denver, and the state economy exploded with new investment. So where is Colorado now? Unsurprisingly, it’s in a recession. Nobody talks about it; Colorado is the silent tribute to the failures of left-wing economic governance. Colorado doesn’t have the geographic advantages of California nor the institutional buy-in of New York. So when things go south, companies pull out. The result is a private sector that has been consistently shrinking. All of the private losses in the state last year were quietly made up with new public sector jobs. However, the government is in a 1.2 billion dollar shortfall, and the Polis regime is quietly admitting that they will have to cut back. While the housing crisis has taken its toll nationwide, it’s even worse in Colorado; homebuyer misery is up in every county across the state. Even after the end of COVID-19 lockdowns, domestic migration never bounced back, and even international migration has fallen off a cliff. The most desirable state in the country has now become a wasteland where everyone wants to leave but can’t because nobody wants to move in. It somehow gets worse, though. Homelessness is up 90% since 2020, never recovering from COVID levels. Even after the end of COVID lockdowns, it only got worse; homelessness of families with children is up 134% between 2023 and 2024. Similarly, crime is up, while red states across the country are seeing drops, and the most unruly cities like Memphis are being tamed by National Guard deployments; Colorado’s violent crime rate has increased by over 30% commensurate with the 28% reduction of prison populations. Even Colorado’s shining jewel Boulder has faded into irrelevance. Once the most illustrious city in America, it used to receive accolades like being the startup capital of the US; it was foretold to be the next Silicon Valley. Now it’s a retirement home with an impending “silver wave.” The only thing keeping Boulder alive right now is the famous University of Colorado Boulder, which heavily inflates its under-24 population. The story is clear: before Colorado could become the next big thing, left-wing governance shut it down. The next Silicon Valley ended up being in Austin, not Boulder. Massive companies like Pfizer, Boom Supersonic, and Palantir have all pulled out of the state. The worst part of all is that Coloradoans will keep voting for it. Whatever voter base that existed 2 decades ago has been supplanted, and even when the overwhelming sentiment across the state is that the left has mismanaged it, the voter base will still vote the left in. The future of Virginia and every Red state that turns Blue isn’t one of bombastic collapse but of entrapment, stagnation, and silent failure. The game plan has been public for some time: once one election is won, irrevocably destroy the ability to lose power, then govern the state into the ground. Catchy bumper stickers and braggadocious remarks on TV aren’t enough anymore; red states must understand the real threat of losing once and guard themselves from it."
