Lord Ratner

Too many confounding variables. First, income taxes, sales/use taxes, and wealth taxes (property tax) are all different concepts. The effects of adding or removing them changes based on which ones you change. You suggest two workable options. No different than they are now. With revenues. You can use already collected revenues (either of the three sources), or issue debt and use future revenues to pay off the debt. The problem with debt isn't the debt itself. Alexander Hamilton understood how good debt could be, and we are a powerhouse because of it. It is *what* you spend it on. The things you ask about are not why we are broke. We came up with a solution to this. Fuel taxes. they have had to be adjusted, and electric cars have presented another opportunity to adjust, but it is a very simple way to tax those who use the roads in a fairly consistent manner. Yeah, that would be strange. But I'm not sure why income or sales taxes couldn't pay for these services. That's a separate conversation from property taxes. Taxation is not theft. If you are pointing that question at me, I never made that claim. What I said is that "property tax is unethical." And I believe that any tax that is unpredictable is immoral. If there is a tax that will exist in a perpetual recurring state (which is already questionable), you should be able to predict the maximum amount of that tax for every single year that you may be paying it from the time of the imposition of the tax. So in the case of California, when you buy a home, you know that the tax will be x% of the price you paid, and it will never go up more than 2% per year.

Sure I did: Your entire post is premised off this statement, and the statement is entirely false. A deficit is never a result of too little income. It is a result of too much spending. That's the short version of why your entire post is wrong. You frame it in the most progressive way imaginable, which is surprising coming from you. Prop 13 was a revolt against high taxes. It accomplished it's goal. Correct. Those who properly budgeted for purchasing a house to account for being able to afford property taxes that can not be increased beyond their capacity to pay due entirely to the purchasing habits of others. No one in CA is being discriminated against. If you think your neighbor should have higher taxes because *you* paid more to buy a home, you are the problem. Please, tell me what things you own, completely and without debt, that you should be priced out of because other people decide they want it more at a later date. Your car? Your clothes? Again, it's *never* under taxation. There is only taxation. The "over" and "under" can only be applied to spending. You are framing this like a liberal. Debt never happens without spending, regardless of the revenue. Ever. No shit. "Writing checks," even your analogy supports my point. writing checks is *spending* Besides, you can run the experiment in other liberal states with no Prop 13 analog. Both New York and New Jersey have deficits. No Prop 13 to lean on. Just look at the spending per captia of CA, which has nothing to do with revenue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_budgets CA: $7,634 NY: $6,746 TX: $3,573 FL: $3,476 Lol, a cartel? You need to elaborate on this one, and explain how the exploding real estate markets in Texas, Arizona, and Florida, all areas with devastating price increases and massive institutional buying, are somehow different. Be sure to account for California's decades-long attack on development and growth. Again, unbelievable framing. Long-term property owners are "pocketing" property taxes? Who's? Yours? Did your taxes go up because of them? Nope. This is some Bernie Sanders level philosophy. It was their money to start with. They bought a house they could afford with a tax burden they could afford. Now because other people are *voluntarily* buying homes at higher prices, the long-term owners are "pocketing" taxes? Incredible. Honestly it's stunning to see an alleged conservative misdiagnose the problem in California so thoroughly as to become progressive in the course of doing so. Even more alarming is what your entire premise leads to. There is only one logical solution to the deficit if the true problem, as you suggest, is under taxation. If you are making the argument that a limit on taxation leads to deficit spending, and deficit spending is ignored by the tax payers, leading to huge debts that explode in the future, and that increasing taxes would somehow limit deficits through public outrage... just look around. Higher revenues don't result in lower deficits unless the higher revenues are acute and unexpected, such as the 2021/2022 tax years. And the government is a goldfish, it will grow to fill whatever size tank you put it in. Look at the federal budget... Even with record revenues and exploding GDP growth during the pandemic, our spending/GDP is at record levels. Prop 13 is one of the purest expressions of limited taxation enacted by a population, and it is especially relevant because it limits an already-immoral form of taxation: wealth taxes. You are suggesting that not only is the wealth tax ethical, it should be unconstrained. Also, using the word "discriminatory" in this context is wildly dishonest. Who is being discriminated against? What is the characteristic targeted in this discrimination? An old couple on fixed income that has lived in the same home for 60 years, bought it when it was affordable and budgeted for the associated taxes, and have decided they would rather stay in their home then make the huge amount of money they would get from selling it, are discriminating against you and I because... what? We were born later? They should have to move to a cheaper state because *you* want more money for the state to spend?

The original tax was designed to double the cost of a Thompson. There's all sorts of fun dumb history about that law, like how it originally banned rifles longer than 18 in, But that would be bad for the firearms industry that was already producing shorter .22 rifles. So they made an exception for .22. Fast forward and the government started selling their surplus M1s, without realizing those rifles violated the law. So the law conveniently changed. Government has always been stupid. That has always been the necessary compromise.

While mathematically you're making a fairly obvious argument (if you increase your spending without increasing revenue, you will have a debt), the point is rather oblique. Prop 13 is not and has never been the problem. Prop 13 is maybe the only ethical element left in the California tax code. The repeated taxation of owned property is unethical. Full stop. Yeah I know property tax is a deeply enmeshed element of American government, but that doesn't change the core unethical nature of it as a wealth tax, which is why every state has had to grapple with that unethical argument in unique and inadequate ways. In California, the answer is prop 13. In Texas, they freeze your property tax when you turn 65. But both of those are bandages for the inherent unsustainability of taxing people on something they responsibly purchased merely because other irresponsible people irresponsibly purchased other property at irresponsible prices. California has one of the largest tax revenues in the world. It is purely and entirely a function of their desire to spend that revenue on social projects and other non-returning ventures. I know that you also criticize the excesses of liberal government, but to even suggest that prop 13 is responsible is to adopt the very justifications that they have used to put themselves in this situation in the first place. The "collection problem" does not exist if there is no allocation problem. The surplus was a one-off artifact of an insane stock market rally. The deficit is partially, as noted, a function of migration. However migration includes people leaving, which should lower the burden on services costs in a well-managed economy. Obviously we all know California is not well managed. It's both, as always. One of the cute things about government is anytime they get an increase in tax revenues, they reformulate expenditures to use every penny of it. Then when the one-time increase goes away, they act as though that was the baseline.

That's what I'm doing. Nothing to do with fires, it's just a superior home to live in.

That's a pretty hot take. The problem in California was that they didn't have enough tax money? I think at this point it's pretty obvious that there's nowhere in the country that doesn't have enough tax money. It is purely and entirely a function of choosing to spend it on the immediate gratification of social programs and neglecting the boring and unrewarding work of preventing catastrophes. "No one cares about the bomb that didn't go off." -Tenet

Doesn't matter. If the insurance company won't cover the house, then the bank won't lend the money. The problem will solve itself.

The never trumpers are absolutely desperate for this to be some sort of Nazi thing, considering they've been fantasizing about Nazis in the Republican party for the last couple election cycles. It wouldn't surprise me at all if the world's richest internet troll did this on purpose. Also super genius billionaires do have a tendency to lose their mind, so who knows.. But it doesn't take a lot of mental horsepower to realize that the most likely answer is not that Elon musk is a secret Nazi.

Those were really good cops. And for a drink mess, she was pretty controlled. I prefer the first one 😂

Hook 'em All!! ☠️🏴‍☠️

I like her 😂🤣

The guy had the balls to go public against the crap we have been complaining about for years, but that's a bad thing now? There's definitely a retard in this conversation...

This is a great analysis, but you left out one key point that I fear might be more causal than anything else you wrote. The people at the top instituting these policies made it to where they are specifically because of their ability to master the very insignificant processes that we're talking about. You are asking them to admit that the very core of their success, and thus their identity, is not only irrelevant, but detrimental to the real mission of killing our enemies and breaking their things. They will never do that.

Some people (who aren't dinosaurs like you 😂🤣) thought that skeletor was referring to the guy who followed Mosley, I forget his name, but he was another skeleton-looking mother fucker.

Way, way earlier than we all thought. The longer I was in, the more I realized the "good dudes" who became bad leaders were just pretending all along.

Don't backpedal.

Oh? Please explain more. I'm from California and my cousin's house just went up in flames. Doesn't mean I'm a little bitch when someone tells a joke online. It was funny and I laughed. It didn't make her house burn any more or less, and I didn't forward the meme to her. And it doesn't matter what state it happens in. You are literally in a joke thread, which you noted and yet still somehow feel the need to be the fun police.

Humor doesn't have a buffer, and the joke didn't target any specific vulnerable person. And people are fighting for their lives all over the world. Just keep scrolling if you didn't like the joke.

A VPN is almost always a waste of money if you are using it for privacy or security. They are great tools for logging into a remote work site and getting things done as if you were there. And they are good at bypassing low-security location based firewalls. But there are a million other ways to track you, and the information is for sale. So even if you use a VPN to hide the destination of your web traffic, and https to hide the content, your device ID, login cookies, MAC addresses, or other identifiable items will link you to one of your many advertiser profiles, and the bad-actor can just buy that and see where you've been.

A VPN and or encryption would do absolutely nothing to prevent what's being discussed here. It prevents your ISP from seeing where your traffic is being directed (the traffic itself is already encrypted and beyond your ISP's ability to read), but the ISP is the tiniest player in the game of data brokerage.

Elon was not chosen by happenstance. He eliminated 75-80% of Twitter's employees, nearly overnight, and nothing changed. We complained for years in the military that there were too many unnecessary tasks. Too many unneeded CBTs. Too many steps on the deployment checklist. Elon rocked the tech and broader business world with a concept they had entirely forgotten: some things don't need to happen. Boom, DEI evaporates overnight. An entire industry that created tens of thousands of jobs... Gone. That's exactly what the Republicans want from Elon. But he had to buy Twitter to make that happen. With the federal government it will be far more about making the jobs undesirable, waiting for people to quit, then deleting the position. It won't work as cleanly as it did at Twitter, but it can still work.

It distracts from his track record of being wrong.

Oh man, blast from the past. I wonder what Hacker is up to these days. Great dude, terrible King Air pilot 🤣😂

I've heard tales from the grey-beards that Korea was almost banned from flying in the US back in the 80s or 90s because their culture of senior worship was so pervasive that they had zero safety instinct. A bunch of pilots from the US were brought in to take over their training and crush the dinosaur captains who felt like they were above criticism, even if they were about to crash a plane. EDIT: Maybe mostly true? From ChatGPT:

Walk away? Why type of high school romance analysis is this? No, they are not going to willingly "lay it down" against China. They are going to send what they have, where we tell them to send it because they know without us they are nothing more than Chinese vacation destinations. And I bet the Japanese have no interest in finding out how much the Chinese remember about their treatment during WWII. And where does this NATO loyalty come from? As soon as the threat from Russia fell with the Berlin Wall, Western Europe allowed their militaries to crumble into dust, finally free to spend that money on social programs and solar panels. NATO is a joke, and it exists for one reason. We saved them from Russia (and freed the rest of them), and they know we are the only thing preventing it from happening again. So in exchange for our blanket of strength, they had to pull their weight (a whopping 2%). Of course future American liberal politicians found orgasmic elation from the fantasy that we had finally defeated human nature once and for all and "ended history," so they were only too happy to look the other way while the European military capability evaporated. Now Russia is reminding everyone just how scary a few hundred thousand soldiers on your border can be, even if they lack any semblance of training or modern equipment, and suddenly the Euros have a newfound appreciation for NATO. Cute. You have to be delusional (and I know you aren't) if you think any of these countries are going to raise a single pistol against China unless they think it's the only way to maintain their sovereignty and get the Americans into the fight. The Germans sacrificed their entire energy industry for cheap Russian gas, just wait until we find out how dependent these countries are on the Chinese when the time comes to "lay it down." Our loyalty has always been transactional. Welcome to democracy. Thomas Jefferson learned it the hard way less than 10 years after he helped create this country. Many others have learned it since. Exactly. NATO only has value if the members are capable of military projection. And if you've ever negotiated anything, you should know that your have no leverage if you aren't willing to walk away.