California’s billionaire tax will make California’s high-speed rail dream come true?

by philg

California proposes to confiscate roughly 5 percent of California billionaires’ wealth (Prop. 40 in the November election). Let’s ignore the fact that the first $1 billion in net worth is exempt and assume that California can harvest 5% of all billionaire wealth. Would that be sufficient to pay for a single high-speed rail line at California government project rates?

ChatGPT says the combined wealth of all of the billionaire douches (about 260 of them) in California is approximately $2.4 trillion, so a very rough estimate of the tax harvest is $120 billion. In fact, advocates of Prop. 40 say that they’ll get $100 billion. Here’s the neutral language of what voters are fed by nonpartisan election officials: “It will raise about $100 billion to replace the funding Trump and his billionaire donors took from working people to line their pockets.” This assumes that nobody moves out of Paradise to Hell (California to tax-free New Hampshire, Tennessee, Miami/Palm Beach, Austin, etc.), which, in any case wouldn’t reduce revenues from this new wealth tax (“The measure would apply the tax to billionaires who were California residents on January 1, 2026“).

Assuming that the advocates are correct and everything works as advertised, how many awesome high-speed rail lines could be built for $100 billion? The projected cost of the 30-year-old single line high-speed rail project is now up to $230 billion (Deplorables at Fox).

Imagine being the richest state in the U.S., imposing an entirely new kind of tax on the richest residents of that state, and still not having enough money to build the kind of railroad that folks in Japan, China, Europe, and Morocco are able to afford and build!

(I’m personally a fan of Prop. 40. California’s billionaires sat still for the 13% state income tax. Moving out of California won’t enable a rich douche to escape the 5% wealth haircut. Maybe a handful of people with assets between $25 million and $1 billion will move out for fear that the next election will hit the “almost rich” with a 5-10% wealth tax, but 23-year-old AI billionaires will quickly replace them. Californians are absurdly undertaxed, despite headlines and appearances. The owners of commercial property may pay almost nothing in property tax due to a combination of Prop. 13 and inflation (they pay tax on the nominal value of the property at the time of purchase plus 2% per year). There is no state estate tax, which makes California a good place for passing down the “generational wealth” that Californians say shouldn’t be possible to pass down. You’d think the peasants would revolt and say that Prop. 13 doesn’t apply to properties worth more than $2 million and that California will take 16% (the Maskachusetts/New York rate) of estates worth over $2 million. But for some reason these obvious methods of reducing inequality are never highlighted or put on the ballot.)

Irrelevant, in my view… “The Net Present Value of the California Billionaire Tax Act” (NBER) says that the tax will actually reduce net tax revenue for the state by about $39 billion over 10 years. The economists behind the paper claim that the billionaire targets of the tax will move out and, therefore, stop paying California’s 13.3% state income tax. Why is that irrelevant? $4 billion/year is only about 1% per year of the state government’s colossal spending. Californians say that they hate inequality and, therefore, they should be happy to bear 1% more of the cost of running their government in exchange for getting rid of some of their richest douches. I would feel more pride of ownership in our 2021 Honda Odyssey if we could expel from the neighborhood the guy with the new Rolls-Royce and also the guy with the 2005 Ford GT. And maybe the other guy with the Rolls-Royce who has been observed (by our 5th grader) picking up in the car line at the local public elementary school. Would that be worth paying more in tax? Sure. If my envy level were high enough, it could even be worth paying 10% more in taxes (property and sales here in Florida; we have no income or estate tax).

Full post, including comments

Having some trouble checking my Bitcoin portfolio

by philg

On the advice of the Sound Money Experts, I moved 100% of my savings into Bitcoin on October 6, 2025. I paid $126,210 per coin and, to keep the coins safe from someone breaking into my desktop PC or phone, I decided to let the professionals at Binance be the custodians of my retirement funds.

I’m having some trouble logging into Binance today. Can anyone share what they know about the likely value of my retirement fund? Nothing unusual is happening in the market or on the Binance exchange according to the company’s home page right now:

Loosely related:

Full post, including comments

Checking in on “We Won’t Be Missed” (labor share of the economy goes to zero)

by philg

A year ago, Pascual Restrepo published the best-titled AI-related related paper ever: “We Won’t be Missed: Work and Growth in the AGI World” (NBER). Abstract:

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) … makes it feasible to perform all economically valuable work using compute. I distinguish between bottleneck and supplementary work—tasks that are essential versus non-essential for unhindered growth. As computational resources expand: (i) the economy automates all bottleneck work, (ii) some supplementary work may be left exclusively to humans, (iii) output becomes linear in compute and labor and its growth is driven by the expansion of compute, (iv) wages converge to the opportunity cost of computational resources required to reproduce human work, and (v) the share of labor income in GDP converges to zero.

The ideas aren’t new, but the Yale econ professor proves via the title that the Queers for Palestine League faculty can add valuable gloss.

Based on observing our neighbors decorate their houses for Halloween and Christmas, sometimes spending up to $10,000 on professional light installation just for Christmas, my own theory is that the economy can expand to accommodate currently-impractical/unaffordable activities such as wrapping cars with seasonal decorations every few months. We’ve already seen that demand for landscaping and horticulture is essentially unlimited. I grew up in a neighborhood where all of the houses had simple landscapes that the homeowners could maintain themselves. Some people would pay a high-school student to mow their lawns, but paying a gardener circa 1970 wasn’t part of an upper-middle-class lifestyle. Due to a combination of the U.S. becoming wealthier and labor becoming cheaper (the miracle of the low-skill immigration wave that began in the mid-1960s), we now have upper-middle-class neighborhoods that can’t be maintained without intensive specialized labor and machines. Imagine the Japanese gardens that people would have if Optimus ownership became the norm!

Are we on Prof. Restrepo’s track yet? Regarding the final and most dire-sounding prediction of labor share going to zero, some progress has been made:

We should expect to hear politicians trumpeting this stat before every election? No matter how large the economic pie and even if we’re way better off, envy will make a falling labor share seem like an unfairness emergency to the average voter. A simpler formulation of the situation is that the economy always has to be divided between labor and capital. Machines are part of capital and machines have been getting smarter. American humans, on the other hand, are becoming less capable. (See “Gen Z — the first generation officially dubbed dumber than the last” (NY Post) and “American IQ Scores Have Rapidly Dropped, Proving the ‘Reverse Flynn Effect'” (Popular Mechanics 2023); note that these data are tough to square with the religion of Enrichment via Immigration because IQ rose between 1924 and the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, decades during which the U.S. was not enriched) We should expect markets to give machines more and humans less.

But is the simple statistic misleading in our “means-tested everything” transferist political system? Consider a “single mom” cruelly forced to work 80 hours/month once her youngest child turns 14 (no need to work at all before then). She gets paid minimum wage times about 18 hours per week, but her total compensation from the economy includes at least the following extras: (a) housing that might be worth $30,000+ per year, (b) health insurance (Medicaid) for herself and her kids (another $30,000/year at market rates), (c) food via SNAP/EBT, and (d) an Obamaphone. The extras are primarily funded by financially successful Americans and those folks get a lot of their income by investments in capital. “In San Francisco, a Family Earning $325,000 Qualifies for Government Aid” (New York Times):

(The couple featured is also a good example of how a lot of wages aren’t set by the market: “Mr. Marman, 36, brings in about $135,000 as a therapist for the city”. The government can pay its workers whatever it wants to pay. (How hard did the New York Times have to work to find a Black husband/Asian wife couple? Grok says that this pairing is 0.08% of U.S. married couples, though likely somewhat higher in SF.))

How about the automation prediction? “No Widespread Displacement, but the AI Employment Gap for Young Workers Has Widened to 19%” (Stanford August 2026):

… young workers in AI-exposed occupations are increasingly falling behind their less-exposed peers. Employment among workers ages 22–25 in highly AI-exposed occupations now stands about 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with employment among similarly aged workers in less-exposed occupations. Experienced workers show no comparable gap. … the shortfall was 15% at the July 2025 data vintage and is 19% as of June 2026. The adjustment appears to operate primarily through reduced hiring of young workers rather than increased separations.

What constitutes “AI-exposed”? That’s in the appendix (page 52 of the PDF). Some of the stuff that I think should be easy to automate, e.g., fitness training, is listed as “lowest exposure” (why can’t a phone app count reps and, via its camera, microphone, and speaker, keep someone on an exercise routine?). The Stanford geniuses think that our neighbors will continue having to pay their mobile detailers (“Cleaners of Vehicles and Equipment”):

Bad news for computer nerds. We’re among the most exposed:

(I don’t think the Stanford authors are considering what would happen if Elon Musk’s promises regarding Optimus turn out to be true. They’re looking at AI without robotics.)

Who wants to predict where things will be in one year? I’ll say that through a combination of market forces and AI and the expansion of the welfare state distorting statistics with more means-tested benefits, the headline labor share falls to 50% by Q3 2027.

Full post, including comments

Who has been to Chiricahua National Park?

by philg

This blog, in 2020: Do we need some more national parks?

A friend who has been suffering through shutdown on an oceanfront estate in Maine mentioned that Acadia National Park has experienced record-breaking visitor counts. For the first time in history, you need to make a reservation before driving into the park at all.

Donald Trump, this week:

Who has been to this park (formerly a national monument)? I’ve flown by in Robinson helicopters (following Interstate 10, with no risk to pedestrians).

Here’s what it looked like in the good old days:

Today (someone needed an aperture vs. depth of field tutorial?):

Looks like it is a 2-hour drive from Tucson and El Güero Canelo.

Related:

Full post, including comments

Mad pumpkin skills at the Palm Beach County Library

by philg

If you need some last-minute pumpkin decoration ideas for Halloween, a couple of examples from the local (Jupiter) branch of the Palm Beach County Library:

What else was topical at the library? A book about Zohran Mamdani and Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed:

Also, a reminder of the true threat to the traditional culture and value system of the United States. Featured by the librarians:

What will your life be like after enough additional immigration to generate European levels of population density here? You will be freed from the tyranny of the private automobile and will be able to wait for, then crowd onto, public transit. Life After Cars:

The time spent waiting for the bus can be put to good use with some Craftivism:

Crafting a Better World: Inspiration and DIY Projects for Craftivists: A Dynamic Craft Book with Hands-On Projects, Learn to Make Art that Makes a Difference (Amazon):

It all started with a tiny stitch and a big prick. For the first two years of the Trump presidency, I watched in quiet dismay as he assaulted every aspect of our democracy and our decency. He felt anathema to the aspirations for my practice as an artist.

I STARTED MAKING THESE CHOCOLATES when George W. Bush was elected and haven’t stopped. They’re a delicious way to express my constant outrage that a woman’s right to bodily autonomy is so often based on laws made by men. We talk a lot at our shop about how not all women have vulvas and not everyone with a vulva is a woman, but everyone can be angry about violations of basic human rights. With this recipe, you can re-create these chocolates to enjoy them on your own, give them to a friend, or sell them at a bake sale to raise money for abortion access funds. I hope they serve as a sweet reminder of a woman’s right to choose.

FURIOUS VULVAS

Makes 10–100 vulvas, depending on the size of the mold

INGREDIENTS

¾ teaspoon pink Hawaiian alaea sea salt; honestly, any flaky high-quality sea salt will work! If you use table salt, use ½ teaspoon and add more to taste.

1 scant tablespoon pink peppercorns

1 pound dark chocolate (Make sure it’s a high-quality chocolate sourced in ethical ways! We use 65% Republica del Cacao and we love it.)

EQUIPMENT

A vulva mold (see below)
A spatula, preferably an offset spatula
A parchment-lined sheet pan

DIRECTIONS

  1. Procure your vulva molds! You can find an abundance of vulva molds online. Searching for “vagina chocolate mold” (even though I know you know that the vagina is the internal genitalia and the vulva

A clever neighbor’s project…

Full post, including comments

Have South and Central America become more conservative because the voters who wanted a massive welfare state all moved to the U.S.?

by philg

The idea of ever-larger-and-more-compassionate government seems to have fallen out of favor lately in Central and South America. Here’s a graphic attributing the shift to the dismantling of USAID (source):

What if the reason is the Biden-Harris administration’s open border policy? Suppose that everyone in Central and South America who wanted to live in a cradle-to-grave work-optional welfare state migrated to the U.S. in 2021-20244. The voters who are left behind are, therefore, the conservative ones.

Separately, how are people feeling about yesterday’s election in Brazil? If it didn’t take a few weeks to count the votes and include a last-minute reversal can it be considered in any way free or fair by California standards? Also, I thought that the U.S. was the only democracy in which an 80-year-old could win the demanding chief executive job but, per usual, was apparently wrong.

(It looks like Lula won using some of the same tactics that Democrats have used recently in the U.S. AP: “Legislation to reduce the country’s workweek from six days to five and weekly working hours from 44 to 40 without reducing pay was approved by Congress 10 days before the runoff. … In September, Lula announced a 15% increase in payments under Brazil’s main welfare program, Bolsa Família, which bases benefits on family size and the number of children. The increase took effect this week, days before the election, and will benefit nearly 50 million people. … Lula on Wednesday endorsed credit relief and tax incentives for small businesses, giving them access to low-interest government loans through public banks and allowing them to renegotiate some of their debt. … Lula also is sending to Congress a bill to establish zero-fare public transportation on weekends.” Question: How is Lula going to argue that Elon Musk will pay for it all? Also, maybe this could be a positive for the U.S.? Brazil right now has a much lower personal income tax rate than the U.S. does, about 27.5% vs. over 50% for Californians and successful New Yorkers. With all of the new state-administered transfers, Brazil might raise its top tax rates and, thus, become less of a competitive threat to the U.S. for certain kinds of enterprises. France is the only nation with a larger welfare state, as a percentage of GDP, than the U.S. and they’re not much of a competitor.)

Related to the human export angle, “Caracas Is Eerily Safe. State Death Squads Made Sure of It.” (New York Times) mostly attributes improved safety in Venezuela to Delcy Rodríguez and Nicolás Maduro killing suspected criminals, but the open borders may also have been critical:

It’s undeniable that security has improved in Caracas and much of the rest of the country, but criminologists expressed skepticism over that figure, which would give Venezuela one of the lowest murder rates in the Americas.

Mass migration also played a role, with gang members constituting a small percentage of the millions who fled Venezuela’s economic collapse.

And just where did Venezuela’s most criminally-adept citizens end up? The NYT doesn’t say, nor do they mention José Antonio Ibarra, the Venezuelan enricher who killed Laken Riley. U.S. taxpayers will be funding Mr. Ibarra’s room, board, health care, and security for approximately the next 60 years. Mr. Ibarra won’t be able to vote in any Venezuelan elections due to his residence-for-life here in the U.S. (source)

Loosely related, If the dark days don’t have you in a suicidal mood… (quoting a Michel Houellebecq novel):

Are you from Brittany?” he asked. “Yes—from Saint-Brieuc!” she replied happily. “But I really like Brazilian dance,” she added, obviously trying to absolve herself for her disinterest in African dance. Much more of this and Bruno would really get irritated. He was starting to get pissed off about the world’s stupid obsession with Brazil. What was so great about Brazil? As far as he knew, Brazil was a shithole full of morons obsessed with soccer and Formula One. It was the ne plus ultra of violence, corruption and misery. If ever a country were loathsome, that country, specifically, was Brazil. Sophie,” announced Bruno, “I could go on vacation to Brazil tomorrow. I’d look around a favela. The minibus would be armor-plated; so in the morning, safe, unafraid, I’d go sightseeing, check out eight-year-old murderers who dream of growing up to be gangsters; thirteen-year-old prostitutes dying of AIDS. I’d spend the afternoon at the beach surrounded by filthy-rich drug barons and pimps. I’m sure that in such a passionate, not to mention liberal, society I could shake off the malaise of Western civilization. You’re right, Sophie: I’ll go straight to a travel agent as soon as I get home.”

In the Department of Election Predictions, it is the 10th anniversary of this tweet:

Full post, including comments

If you cancel your New York Times subscription they’ll offer you about 85 percent off

by philg

The NYT recently raised the price of my subscription to $29/month (maybe it was $8/month before?). Given that half of their content isn’t news, but rather a daily reminder that Democrats still hate Donald Trump, I clicked “Cancel Subscription” and that put me into a pipeline where I was offered a $1/week deal for a year ($52/year rather than $348/year; an 85% discount).

What was on the front page when I canceled? Trump is bad because of something he did or said about Ohio. People in Iowa are more sophisticated than progressive New Yorkers previously thought because it turns out that Iowans also hate Trump. A member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community in New Hampshire might become a senator.

Full post, including comments

Protesters in Marseille carry the French flag according to the New York Times and the Palestinian flag according to X

by philg

“Looting Left Damage and Fear on Paradise Street in Marseille” (NYT, today):

A week ago, mostly peaceful demonstrations in cities across France devolved into clashes between protesters and the police. Then looters entered the fray, breaking into stores, supermarkets and shopping malls, and hauling off whatever they could.

Selected by the New York Times editors, a photo of the typical protester, apparently a huge French patriot:

What is shown on X from the same event in Marseille? Translation from Grok: “In Marseille, my city, to my great despair, it is not the French flag that flies but that of Hamas.”

(Given our failure, thus far, to force the Iranians to surrender, this is perhaps not the best time to joke about the official French flag being white. On the other hand, the Wall Street Journal suggests that Trump’s painfully slow strategy might be working. “Iran’s Fleet of Shadow Tankers Has Run Out of Oil After Monthslong U.S. Blockade” says “Tehran had millions of barrels of crude in tankers in Asian waters that gave it a steady flow of cash. Now, that oil has dried up.” See also “Iran Is Now Losing Overland Trade Routes to U.S. Pressure” (WSJ). On the third hand, what difference does any of this make if Iran can use domestic materials to make electrical power, drones, and missiles?)

Separately, who will be watching the Paris NFL game tomorrow? France wasn’t violent enough and, therefore, they had to import violence from the U.S.? ESPN:

The article notes that the “real football” fans won’t be able to see too many dusty old paintings and sculptures:

Major museums, including the Louvre and Orsay Museum, are closed Saturday, though tourists were lined up to enter Notre Dame Cathedral. French authorities are intent on preventing a repeat of recent violent unrest.

Full post, including comments

The 2026 Kwanzaa stamps are available

by philg

Who is old enough to be sending traditional hardcopy Christmas/New Year’s cards this year? Good news for fellow Boomers: USPS.com has the new Kwanzaa stamps.

But maybe your friends and family would rather learn more about fentanyl?

Sunflowers, which the USPS tells us are “native” (immigrant humans make every native-born American’s life better; immigrant plants are disastrous, though):

For those passionate about social justice, the bad news is that there is still no George Floyd commemorative stamp. Nor is there a stamp regarding the genocide committed by the Chi Phi fraternity at Cornell. Perhaps these lowrider stamps will be some consolation, though I don’t think our Honda Odyssey qualifies:

Speaking of lowriders, here’s a picture of one from a October 2026 Cars and Coffee (see Cars and Coffee at the Birthplace of the IBM PC (Boca Raton, Florida) here in Palm Beach County. Notice the hateful transphobia (the implication that a pregnant person who is “expectant” identifies as a “mother”):

Paint detail on another lowrider at the event:

And a 1979-ish Chevrolet Monte Carlo:

Full post, including comments

The long tail of losing tax base via lockdown (and of gaining tax base by rejecting Faucism)

by philg

A woman around age 30 who works for Cleveland Clinic here (yes, I know that it sounds like a contradiction, but Cleveland Clinic has a massive operation in SE Florida) shared her Floridian Origin Story. She and her now-husband came to Fort Lauderdale on vacation in 2020 and discovered that it was possible for young people to enjoy a mask-free lockdown-free lifestyle without being felled by SARS-CoV-2. The couple packed up and moved and never looked back to their deep roots in Massachusetts (the now-wife had grown up in a house that her grandparents purchased and her parents still live there).

How much tax base was lost via the transformation from Massachusetts to Maskachusetts? The immediately loss was modest, only about 5 percent of perhaps $250,000 in joint income or $12,500 per year in state income tax. Figure another $2,000 in lost sales tax and $5,000 per year in lost property tax (whether the couple had rented or purchased). A total of $20,000 per year.

What’s the long tail? The parents are executives back in MA and they’re approaching retirement age. They are planning to keep their house on Cape Cod, but live in Florida for most of the year so that they can spend time with their daughter and any grandkids. If the daughter hadn’t been driven to Florida by the lockdowns, mask orders, vaccine orders, etc., the parents wouldn’t have followed. The state will likely lose at least another $40,000 per year in tax receipts and won’t get the state estate tax that they’d hoped to harvest from the dead bodies of the parents. (See Effect on children’s wealth when parents move to Florida.)

Although Florida lacks both income and estate taxes, these folks are contributing to the Florida economy and tax base by living here. Thus, it seems that Ron DeSantis’s decision to reject Faucism and follow the Church of Sweden will pay financial dividends to the state for many decades to come.

Loosely related, sunset approaches at Pine Glades Natural Area, about 20 minutes from Abacoa.

Full post, including comments