What's happening with this California flight stuff?
Because I was with Palmer over Christmas and a bunch of other guys from that side.
And I didn't know about it.
I knew that it was going to be brought in before the end of the year.
It's this sort of sticky thing that seems to be following people around, but it's also going to get worse over time.
It seems like there's more and more rumblings that stuff's going to keep on.
This feels like the sort of core engine of California's prosperity since the 1800s is now unraveling.
Yeah, I'm in a bunch of group chats.
I talk to a lot of people.
I would say probably a third of people I talk to have already left.
You're asking about people leaving, right?
And I would say, like a survey we did informally in a group which has been published, talked about, is close to 87 of people are going to leave.
These are the core leaders in tech.
And the other thing is I talked to a lot of emerging tech CEOs of startups that are doing really well, that are growing, and they're all looking to leave.
Like there was one company i was talking to, they're going to move up to northern california from southern and they're like now i'm going to move to nevada and that's because they're worried about what's next.
So california is in this fundamental like sinkhole right now.
Um, it goes back to my point about people making promises In order to get elected.
Politicians promise people something that they don't have today.
That's how you get elected.
You don't get elected by saying, I'm going to take stuff away from you.
The government's going to do less for you.
Show me one politician in the last hundred years has been elected saying that.
And there's a fundamental kind of like moment, this come to Jesus moment.
Can you keep doing these promises?
Can you even meet the promises you've already made?
And in California, the answer is no.
California set up a system where we created the highest tax rate in the country because of all the success in Silicon Valley, all the income that's being generated, all the success and capital gains and whatnot, and use that to fund a bunch of nonsense.
The, the bullet train to nowhere you know, freaking like 30 billion dollars in nothing like the.
How much is it?
30 billion?
Um, and they've had six ceos, by the way, that have all been fired, or the one guy just got arrested.
It's insane.
It was just published that this homeless program 220 million was spent on it.
Six homeless people got themselves out of the cycle of poverty that they were in.
You go down the list.
Sorry, what was that thing about the affordable internet?
Oh, rural broadband.
That was it.
And for the same amount of money that was spent, I think every American citizen could have got Starlink.
Yeah.
And that one, that's a federal problem.
I don't- Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
But-
You're gonna get me very emotional.
I've been very like- You seem like an emotional guy.
I've been very like unemotional during our talk about science in the future.
And then this is the opposite.
Okay, this is the bullshit.
The opposite that happens when social systems become manifest like rotten.
It's a system where people lie to each other in order to keep themselves in power, in order to keep their money flowing, in order to keep this nonsense up and running.
People lie to themselves, they lie to their constituents and the democracy starts to become like what's the point?
Like, does this even work?
California in particular We made a bunch of changes to the pension system.
So we have public pensions for public employees in California.
And over the past 12 to 15 years those changes have resulted in a bunch of guarantees to people on their future retirement benefits that the state simply cannot afford to meet.
The estimate currently is that there's $600 billion to a trillion dollars in the hole, okay?
The state then has a question how are we going to like pay for all these people, all the stuff that we promised them?
And that's a big part.
And then there's also all the near-term stuff like healthcare costs.
Hey, we promised them healthcare.
We promised our union workers healthcare.
We've got to figure out a way to fund the healthcare because the promises were made.
But the promises were never funded.
The promises were never possible to be funded.
And then suddenly it all comes to roost and everyone's like well, how are we going to make the payments now?
How are we going to fill the hole?
That's the situation California is in.
California is such a heaping liability problem that it's now you're seeing like all the rats jumping off the ship.
Or they're burning the ship or the people are leaving the ship.
I don't know what the right analogy to use is, but that's the chaos that's ensuing in California in this very moment.
And so we talk a lot about the billionaire tax.
The billionaire tax came about because of one union, one guy at one union called SEIU-UHW, who set up a scheme where they would tax you 5 of your net worth.
If your net worth is over a billion dollars, which everyone in this audience is like, who cares?
Screw the billionaires.
But what it does is it gives the state assembly, the legislature, the ability to in the future change the threshold and the amount.
So theoretically you could take the 5 on billionaires one time and make it 1 on billionaires every year.
Wasn't this the case with the original income tax?
1930, it was 1%.
Tell people the story of how the original income tax- I mean the original income tax was pitched because we did not have an income tax in the United States.
And that was, again, why this country was founded.
It was set up as no taxation without representation.
There was a huge tax scheme to fund all of the nonsense that was going on in England.
Uh careful, careful now i mean at the time, very different um, not to speak to the people, but the uh, let's call it the aristocracy.
And uh, you know what we call the elites today?
And, by the way the, i think about the term the elites.
It's sort of like that spider-man meme where, like everyone's, you're the elite, you're the elite, you're the elite.
Like the tech guy's the elite, like That's kind of the moment we're in right now.
It's like the tech guys are the elites.
But like the tech guys last year were telling, they were calling out the NGOs as the elites.
And then, you know, it's just like everyone's an elite.
Your privilege is more privileged than my privilege.
Yeah, this is all rooted in Marxist philosophies, by the way.
It's all this like oppressor, oppress stuff.
Like, again, But all of those philosophies fundamentally distinguish people's agency.
This is so critical for people to understand.
When you give people a bunch of stuff or you create a governmental system or economic system that says you do X, you get Y, you're a slave to that system.
You are now oppressed, no matter what anyone tells you.
You are not getting risen up and you're not, and pulling other people down doesn't solve any of your problems.
Another conversation for another day.
But in California.
So we started out as a one.
So the way they started the income tax in the United States was they're like hey, we'll promise everyone 1 on incomes over whatever it was at the time I think 10000 a year.
You probably look it up.
And that was it.
And then over time, it's like, wait, we had to fund a war.
And now we're going to expand the highway system.
So the original income tax was 1%.
1% on high net worth people, on high earning people.
And that's it.
Jared, chad this and find out how the income tax progressed over time.
I want to see this.
Right.
And you can look at this.
And so then it became like, suddenly today, everyone pays an income tax.
In California, I pay 53% income tax.
And most people pay an income tax.
And now they're creating a whole new tax regime.
And I want to talk about this, importantly, what they're trying to do in California.
Here you go.
It was a temporary wartime tax.
And, you know, again, leading up to this, we had tariffs to fund the government.
The government was small.
Like the government wasn't meant to be, this big system that took care of everyone and did all this stuff.
Keep going.
Coming out of World War II.
And here's the income tax started out as 1 on income over 3000 a year.
And then there was like a progression.
They added a 7% top rate later.
And then you can kind of see here when the thing kind of expanded.
Oh, wow.
1944 to 1945 in World War II, the top rate was 94%.
Yeah, they took everyone's money to fund the war.
But that set a precedent, because what happened at that point is after they set the precedent.
And then we have this kind of FDR kind of New Deal expansionism.
All the stuff that happened post-World War II in the United States was like holy crap, we can get the government to do big stuff.
Let's do big stuff to make our lives better.
You can see that that sound principle, like it makes sense.
It sounds good in principle, but this is where it leads us to today.
Because every year, once you start thinking about the government as solving your problems and doing things for you, that becomes something that only escalates up.
It never goes down.
The thing about if 51% can vote themselves, what the 49%.
So this is the next thing that happens.
So now, so that's income.
Let's say you've paid your income tax and you own a bunch of stuff.
That's now your private property.
You own this stuff, that's yours.
So now comes along the government or this new bill, the Billionaire Tax Act in California.
And for the first time ever in the United States, we're trying to create a wealth tax.
It doesn't matter that it's billionaires and it doesn't matter that it's one time or 5%.
What you're saying is that the stuff that you've already paid taxes on, that you now own, that's in your backyard all your iron ore that you've stored in the backyard.
That's correct.
Get off it.
Yeah.
Or your cool podcast studio.
You own these things.
You've paid taxes, you've earned your money, and you bought this stuff.
But now the government can come in and say, you know what?
We want that lamp.
We want half your iron ore.
We're going to take all your private property.
They're going to get all your private property.
That's what a wealth tax does, is it taxes people on post-tax earnings.
It takes away private property.
If you give the government the ability to do that on even 1 of net worth for billionaires, The next step is 5 of the billionaires, or maybe 2 of millionaires.
And then maybe it's 3% on people making that have a net worth of 100 grand a year.
And, by the way, to figure out how much you have what your assets are, you gotta send me a list every year of everything you own.
So now the government gets to look into your house, not just see what's in your bank account, what stocks you own, but what cars do you own.
What's the value of those cars?
How much is that art worth?
What's everything here worth?
Private property rights go out the window when you institute a wealth tax, because now the government has the right to assess all your value and to take anything they want from you, based on a vote where a bunch of people raise their hand and say we'll increase the tax rate to this 5 2 10, whatever it is.
And here's the threshold and we'll take it every year.
And when you do that, it eventually leads to 51% of people voting to take everything from 49%.
That's the worst case.
That's the end state of this, is it eats itself.
And that's socialism.
And so I think that a wealth tax, and look, it's not gonna affect me this California tax.
So like don't think that I'm trying to like speak my book or whatever the comments or bullshits are.
I think this is a fundamental principled issue that by degrading private property rights, we are setting a precedent in the United States.
That is the foundation of why the United States was set up in the first place, which is for all of us that came to this country to get away from tyrannical governments outside the United States that took all our shit and controlled everything and told us what to do all the time.
And we came here and we get to have private property.
Sure, I'll pay my tax.
Here's my 53%.
Thank you very much, government, for all the great stuff you do, for all the services you provide.
Now fuck off.
Now fuck off and leave me alone.
And that's not the case anymore when this passes.
Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna, all these national politicians AOC, Elizabeth Warren they're all saying we need to have a national wealth tax now.
So it's not just in California.
This is going to be the issue between 2026 and 2028.
The elites are the billionaires and the tech people.
They're coming after them.
And the manifestation of that is to create this wealth tax.
And that gives the government the system by which private property rights are gone.
And the United States is a very questionable future at that point.
That's the thing I worry about the most.
And I juxtapose that with my optimism about the future and this amazing shit.
I mean, think about it.
This amazing shit that's happening in the world, We're gonna have free fucking energy.
We're gonna live forever.
We're gonna have all of this insane stuff that we never imagined abundance and resources that we could never contemplate.
Happiness, spending time with family, working less hours, robots that build shit for us.
Everything is gonna get better.
Everything is getting better.
Everything is getting more amazing.
And then we're like, let's fuck ourselves.
Like...
Why not?
Because we'll just fuck ourselves.
And you know this is this principle of like.
I don't like using the term good versus evil, but it's like are you thinking about the future optimistically or pessimistically?
If you're thinking about the future, as these are control system.
These tech guys are crazy.
This is dystopian blah blah, blah.
You know the number one.
The most unfavorable thing in the United States right now, according to a recent poll, is AI.
More unfavorable than Donald Trump, more unfavorable than everything.
It's the most unfavorable thing, because it is this narrative that everyone's been instituted in their minds that this is the thing that destroys us.
Yada, yada.
And that's the choice we have.
That's the choice we have right now, is do we wanna walk this path of abundance?
Or do we want to lock ourselves up?
And I will say the counterbalancing force, and people won't like hearing this, but the counterbalancing force in the world will be a place like China.
Because if the United States walks this path, other countries will not walk this path.
And it will glean the benefits therein.
And we have to recognize that.
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