Wind Turbines That Drain The Sky

SPEAKER_00 0:17

I had a I have a sort of uncle who who writes for High Times, the magazine for weed in New York. He's a cool guy, if you can imagine. And he he was talking about wind energy. And he wrote an article in High Times about how if you build a lot of like wind turbines that actually you could like you could like run out of wind. Like it could use up the wind. I was like, are articles in high times supposed to be like bots you have when you're high? Because that sounds like that's yeah, that sounds like an ungodly. I know, right? Like wind turbines use up all the wind, the natural resource of wind.

SPEAKER_02 1:02

Boats, sailboats stranded across the globe. Right, yeah, no more sailing. Jets jet stream destroyed by wind turbines.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

I guess the same thing could be said for solar panels, right? If you if you literally sucked like all the sunlight energy out of the sun that hit the earth and made it all into electricity, there it would be perpetual darkness, right?

SPEAKER_02 1:28

You're talking about like creating an exoskeleton on the planet made out of solar panels that absorbs all but it like keeps up perpetual darkness.

SPEAKER_00 1:41

Yeah. 200 feet up to do it. Yeah, like a Dyson sphere around the Earth or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

Some rich trillionaires like, I'll just build nobody's claimed the you know the toposphere. I'll just build a I'll build solar panels and steal all the world's like that's that's a Mr. Burns plan.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

That's right. And it's a good thing we're talking about billionaires because that's the solution for today. No, we're not gonna solve billionaires, but I'm gonna propose something that is new that I've never heard of and is not no one's talked about, which is a progressive property tax.

SPEAKER_02 2:19

Okay.

The Progressive Property Tax Pitch

SPEAKER_02 2:20

But this would be a solution to the high taxing progressive properties.

SPEAKER_00 2:24

Yeah, so if you voted for Obama, then we tax you. But if you voted for anybody else, then Yoga Studios. Oh, they're the they're the we're really putting an extra flexibility tax. Yeah, it's called the flex, the flex tax, yeah. On the yoga So basically the way property tax is collected today, well, this is a also so it's a solution to the housing problem, like the fact that there is not affordable housing, especially affordable housing to buy, but also it's also a solution to Prop 13 in California, which for all of our millions of non-Californian listeners, Prop 13 is the law in California that says that property tax on commercial and residential properties, I didn't realize actually commercial properties do the same thing, which is crazy, is you only pay taxes on property taxes on the cost at sale the last time it changed hands. So if you bought if you bought a house in 1985 for a nickel and a bottle of soda can, a soda pop, then today you still just pay property tax, which in California is like 1%, on that nickel and soda pop. You don't pay, even though now it's worth two and a half million dollars and you're in some neighborhood, you know, in San Francisco. You don't you don't pay.

SPEAKER_02 3:46

With the idea being that like you catch up eventually because you move, you get a new place, you sell your place, people move around.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

But it's just meant to be a tax reduction.

SPEAKER_02 3:58

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Yeah.

How Prop 13 Warps California

SPEAKER_00 4:00

So we can let me get into the solution, then we can go back and explain how stupid Prop 13 is and how bad it is for the state. So property taxes are everywhere in the country, property taxes are just, you know, you either do the assessed value, or in California is the last, you know, the last purchase value, and you take some percentage, and then you just pay that percentage usually twice a year. You pay half and then half. The highest property tax in the nation is two percent in New Jersey, and the lowest in the nation is like I think some states have no property tax.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

Like I think, or no, no, California is pretty low.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

Like it's probably somewhere between one and two is like most property taxes.

SPEAKER_02 4:41

I always hear about I know nothing about this, but I always hear about Florida having very uh kind tax laws, which is why people go down there.

SPEAKER_00 4:51

Yeah, they have no income tax, but I think everybody let me just check, uh let me just check quickly by sort of sort of Google, oh Hawaii 0.25, 0.27 Hawaii. Alabama, 0.38, Arizona, 0.43, Ohio 0.43, Tennessee 0.43. So the lowest is a quarter, and then somewhere hovering around like half a percent, then California is one percent. But you have to remember all of those are at assessed, the assessed value. So Hawaii at the assessed value at a quarter of a percent actually might be a lot more than California at the at the crop tranchance value. Anyways, so the Prop 13 is not good because it keeps California, even though it's a very wealthy state, it actually makes the state very poor in terms of their budget. They can't actually do as much as the state proportionally could do if they actually charged like a more reasonable, like a more standard like 1% on the assessed value uh of property. And also it makes California has very high income taxes, and people like complain about that. And that's partly to make up for the low property tax. And an income tax is generally more is not as progressive, right? It hits poor people more than a property tax because very few people, you know, not as many people own their home or own property as people who work. Everyone works, everyone pays property tax, basically. If you make more than $12,000 a year, you make pay property tax or you pay income tax. But if but not everyone who makes over $12,000 a year owns a home or a condo or something, and so they don't pay, you know. And then the fact that commercial buildings are also Prop 13 is crazy because you know, a corporation could own a building for a hundred.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

So they don't the human could die, and then it's that's what I was gonna ask. I was like, is this a dumb question?

SPEAKER_02 6:45

Tell me that they're paying property tax uh theoretically on the value that it was like 75 years ago, yes, and not the crazy value that it is. While they've driven up California, yeah, while they've driven up the prices of everything around them and made everyone else have to pay more property taxes.

SPEAKER_00 7:06

So that's a good example, Disney World, but uh, you know, an even more egregious example was brought up by um was brought up by um the famous outlier and uh what's his name? He wrote outlier match. Yeah, Malcolm Gladwell on his podcast brought up how their golf courses, the way golf courses in California do this is they they buy, this is crazy. They buy and sell shares in a in a structured way so that they can never claim to ever have been sold, even though ownership changes hands. So it's like the ship of Theseus, they sell like shares, and then other people sell their shares out, and other people buy shares, and other people sell their shares out, and other people buy shares. And over time, there's totally new owners, but the but they claim to never have had a sale where they sell the whole Gulf Cruise. So every bit of property tax is the same as 1970.

SPEAKER_02 8:03

Put that new heavy tax on me, that would be unfair to me. And so just everybody skates forever, and then they're just like, how many let's get what right?

SPEAKER_00 8:12

When you say let's get rid of Prop 13, people say you're gonna kick grandmas out of their homes. That's always the thing. There's gonna be a bunch of people who maybe aren't fixed incomes who bought their homes in 1972 or 1985 or 1999 or something, and now they're like 70 years old. And if you said tomorrow you got to pay the assessed value 1% every year, they might have a three million dollar house. They got to pay $30,000 in taxes next year. They're paying, they're paying nickel and a soda pop for taxes this year, they'd be pushed out of their home, which really means they have to sell their multi-million dollar home, pocket those millions of dollars, and go live somewhere or rent or go live somewhere where they can afford, yeah, or downgrade down to you know, we don't have the liquid assets to pay this giant thing because we have such an enormous value property here. Right. I'm so wealthy that I can't pay the tax on my wealth. So, so this is what this is what people say. Even though that's a very small number of people, people still complain. And then a bunch of just like, you know, homeowner people who do have the money, but they just don't want to pay the taxes, right? They don't want their taxes to go up. So I have a solution, and that's called progressive property tax. No one collects property taxes this way, but I think this is the way that would be a better way to collect property taxes in any state, if any governors are listening, they could implement this anywhere, but it would especially work well in California, but it really will work well everywhere. So there's also the complaint that like private equity and like hedge funds are buying like homes and that they don't people don't like that. So this is a solution to that too, because this would hit them harder. Okay, so what you do is you say instead of taking the property and saying you owe 1% on that property, you take all of a person's the valve, the assessed value of all of a person's property, and you build a progressive brackets on top of that. So for example, the first maybe

Building Brackets For Real Estate

SPEAKER_00 10:10

you say the first $500,000 of property that you own, zero taxes.

SPEAKER_02 10:16

Zero tax property property, or are we talking like cars and gold nuggets?

SPEAKER_00 10:22

No, no, just this is just real estate. This is just real estate. Yeah. So a full wealth tax, a full wealth tax would take into account, you know, stocks and bonds and you know, other assets that you had, right, and to do a wealth tax. Right. Wealth taxes are great. And and I I'm in favor of wealth taxes. We already have wealth taxes in the form of property taxes. So, in a way, you know, what I'm trying to recommend is a property tax that fixes the problems with property taxes, fixes the problems with homes and how and affordable homes and housing, and also is more of a wealth tax. So it hits the higher end more and it hits the lower end less. It carves up for the rest. The most of us who are just workers and want to own maybe one home, we pay or we should pay very low tax. And people who own 10 homes or multi-million dollar homes should pay much more tax, right? So the way you do that is through progressive taxation, which we already have for income, but we don't have, we don't have any taxes on wealth. Right. And we don't have, and then our progress and our property taxes are more of a flat tax. So we really have like a flat tax for property when I'm and I'm suggesting a progressive one. So what you do is you take into account all the all the well, all the property someone has. So say I have three million dollar homes. The first $500,000 of those three million dollars, I don't pay any taxes on. Okay. So I only have a tax burden on two and a half million. Okay. And then let's say from $500,000 to $5 million, I only pay half a percent, which is like Alabama's tax rate. So it's a very low tax rate. It's one of the lowest in the whole country on two million, two, on two and a half million, or or let's say on the next, you know, five million dollars. So I, as someone with three homes, with three million dollar homes, would only pay half a percent on two and a half million. It's great.

unknown 12:12

Right.

SPEAKER_00 12:13

For example. Now, if I have more property, say we do the cutoff, I'm just throwing these cutoffs, like you'd have to dial in the exact cutoffs, like some economist or someone would have to dial in the exact cutoffs, but it would be a progressive thing. So when you get above, you know, 10 million or you know, 20 million, it got it's the top tax bracket in the whole country. It's 2%, or maybe there's even like a super bracket. Right. If you have, if you have you know $50 million in real estate it's in a in California, maybe after the 50th millionth dollar, all the other property above that is charged, maybe charged two and a half percent or three percent, right? Okay. So this what it does is makes it so that it brings in far more taxes. Okay.

unknown 13:02

Right.

SPEAKER_00 13:02

So that's good. It almost I I calculated out like a rough estimate, and it would basically double the amount of property tax brought in. So it would go from California brings in about 100 billion, and this would bring it to about 170 billion to 200 billion. So it would be like 50% to double the amount of taxes brought in from that. Now that's money to California. I would recommend use for building more housing, right? Mostly. And also maybe doing like Medicare for all or paid parental leave, something everyone agrees with, everyone wants. I would tie that money to something everybody already agrees to. You could lower the income tax a little bit too. I would say let's lower, let's get rid of taxes on tips, let's get rid of taxes on Social Security, you know, things that hit the poorest, you know, working people should their taxes should be lowered in California. Because like I said, you could do some tax rebate there too.

SPEAKER_02 13:54

Yeah, because I saw a thing about Jeff Bezos where he it was an analysis where he pays himself like a minimum salary of like 80, or like uh some some under a hundred thousand dollar salary for himself, and then to get to a certain tax bracket, a minimal tax bracket, and then he supplements the rest of his income and lifestyle as borrowings against his holdings or whatever, you know, like other things. But if you charge him a property tax, like he lives somewhere. He lives in a he lives in a in a big extravagant place in a bunker somewhere or that a person who makes a hundred thousand dollars would live in. And so he stops escaping or he stops having that loophole, it sounds like.

SPEAKER_00 14:41

Right. Exactly, exactly. But normal Californians can still buy can still live in a relatively low tax property environment, right? Which is good because they can buy homes more easily because the taxes don't don't don't raise the cost of the house. And also the old grandmas can like live in their million-dollar home and only pay half a percent on five hundred thousand dollars a year, which is you know, which is whatever twelve thousand dollars a year is a thing. Not very much. They can it's probably what they pay already. And so what this would do is I wonder if Hawaii wouldn't actually adopt this because Hawaiian net native Hawaiians are getting kind of mad at like billionaires like buying up a lot of their land. And if they put this in place, normal working Hawaiians would be mostly carved out of having they could continue to have 0.25% or whatever taxes up to up to $2 million. And then above $2 million, you could rapidly ramp up the property tax much higher. So then, you know, billionaires and hundreds of millionaire people and developers, you know, people who are buying up a lot of real estate for speculative purposes, they're all paying maximum tax rate, 2% a year on the assessed value. Uh, and that would then make people say, you know, am I really going to go speculate in Hawaii? No, I'm just gonna go live there because it's beautiful and that's good. That's what the Hawaiians want. They want like people to just be there working and living and enjoying, not speculating on their country, on their land.

SPEAKER_02 16:13

Yeah, I've heard there are, I mean, there are active people who make sure that laws and such are so that they don't have an influx of people just snapping up all the spots and making it all like resorts. And then like nobody can actually live there who's from there, nobody can actually exist there other than ultra-rich people who are coming and just using the, you know, they environment.

SPEAKER_00 16:36

And Montana, Montana has this problem too, famously. Montana has a huge problem of wealthy people coming in and buying ranches and buying up land in Montana, and Montanans are like screwed. Their housing costs, if you look this up, it's crazy. The housing costs in Montana are like insanely high. And everyone says, you know, there's these sort of centrist, sort of corporate Democrats and sort of Yimbies and stuff who say, oh, it's because they need to build more housing. But it's like the population of Montana hasn't really changed much. It's really because of outside money coming in and buying up all the property and pushing the prices higher. It's not because there was like a million more Montanans born or like moved to Montana. Montana isn't some like giant like net population growth state. So it so it's not like they have they don't have enough houses. It's that people are hoarding the houses away from the people who want to live in them, right? And this is the problem generally with housing around the world. So this is something that was brought to my attention by Gary's Economics, who everyone, if you're not already familiar, should go listen to Gary's Economics. He's the tax wealth, not working guy. But he did a whole episode. Yeah, he did a whole episode on housing, and he was like, it can't be the amount of housing available. Because if it were, some parts of the world would build enough housing to get rid of it, right? Like to make it so housing was cheap. But everywhere you go, housing is expensive, everywhere. Shanghai, Beijing, you know, Santa Cruz, like Buenos Aires, like everywhere you go. And that's because everywhere you go, the wealthy are getting wealthier because of capitalism and because of neoliberal, you know, policies and globalization. So what we need to do is something more like this a progressive tax on property that hits the very, very wealthy, but leaves the rest of us alone, so that the very wealthy have to sell their homes. You know, if you own 20, if you have $50 million worth of housing, and maybe on the top 20 million, you're paying 2% a year, or maybe it's even a super rate, you know, you're paying 3% a year on these, you know, on your on your excessive amount of housing, you're gonna say, I need to rent out all my housing. So I get I'm getting income to pay those taxes, right? So you're either gonna rent it out or you're gonna sell it. And if you sell it, that means there's more housing on the market for people to buy.

SPEAKER_03 19:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:05

And that might just mean another millionaire buys it. So instead of having one multi-million dollar property, they have two or something, whatever. But there's gonna be a general downward pressure of freeing up that property and demand for more affordable properties.

SPEAKER_01 19:24

Agreed. I like this.

SPEAKER_00 19:26

Yeah, so this is like a way to, yeah. And then you could also use what I'm the there's also the income that it brings in. And I think the income that it brings in should go towards housing so that people can buy, more people can buy their first home and buy a home. I think it's really important for people to own homes. I I know that I cycle, I bought a home. I was lucky enough just because I'll just be candid, it's because my parents were able to help me with the down payment. This is how most millennials who could buy homes are able to buy a home. And it's not fair. It shouldn't be that way. It should be that everyone could be just working and then buy a condo or a home. Like that should be the way it works. And that's what I I'm committed to working towards for other people, even though I have the privilege of, you know, whatever, my parents being they're not wealthy, wealthy, wealthy, but they're doctors, they work hard, they worked hard their whole lives, saving people's lives. Right. And they are able to help their kids with things. Um, but that shouldn't be the way it works. It should be that if you work for 10 years and you're 35 years old, you should be able to buy a home. And that should be like a no questions asked. That should be the way it should work for everyone. If you wait tables for 10 years, you should be able to buy a home, in my opinion.

SPEAKER_02 20:32

Which is how it was for the boomer generation.

SPEAKER_00 20:34

I mean, that was right. Well, not exactly if you wait tables, but yes, it was much, much, much more attainable. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it should be even more attainable than then because we're wealthier than we were then. The society as a whole is wealthier. We should all enjoy the wealth of our more wealthy world and society. So, anyways, I would take the prop the money that comes in from that and tie it to further reducing the cost of housing and making getting rid of homelessness, which is pretty easy to do, actually, all you know, especially if there's a ton more housing on the market. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:06

Uh you have to change the whole hearts and minds of people, though, which is maybe the harder part.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

Yeah, I would just turn this money into working people, and then maybe even lowering taxes on working people. Um, bro, both Bezos did get this right the other day when you know he went, he went viral a little bit saying, why is a nurse who makes $75,000 a year paying $12,000 in taxes? We should lower her taxes. But then he didn't. What but then that's sort of he's right. He got half of it right. He he wasn't willing, of course, because he's like a selfish jerk. He wasn't willing to say, and I and people like me should make up the difference. You know, he didn't go there, right? But we but we can go there because we're working people, we can say the whole truth. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 21:52

Well, uh yeah. No one's no one's paying me to keep my side. I mean, yet we'll see. I have a email. You can We're always open to bribery. Of course.

SPEAKER_00 22:03

The door to bribery is always open on this.

SPEAKER_02 22:05

Just for lack of availability, really, is all how our morals work.

SPEAKER_00 22:10

You won't know when we begin to be bribed, but there will be signs.

SPEAKER_02 22:14

Big golden neon flashing signs. All right. So I have three questions that have come to mind about this. Okay. When you're talking about property, our and we're talking about Jeff Bezos. What about like his $500 million super yacht? Or like no private jets.

SPEAKER_00 22:36

Those are other yeah, yes. So if you I can link in the so I can we just include anything with a bedroom.

SPEAKER_02 22:43

Like if it's a good thing. No, no, no, no.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

Because if we don't think it's a bedroom, it's simple. No, no, we're trying to make this simple for the tax code. So the tax code, they are people already have it all defined. The buildings, there they are, homes, you know, they're already all property tax. You know, that's already there. So we're not trying to change that. That would be too kind of crazy. It's just saying, hey, we're gonna fix housing. How are we gonna fix it? We're gonna do a progressive income, progressive property tax. How are we gonna what are we gonna use the money for to get rid of homelessness and make housing available to all? And maybe there's some tax rebates, you know, further tax rebates for working people uh on income tax or something. So so it's trying to keep it simple. You will have to add one thing though, which is what's called a beneficiary, uh primary beneficiary registry. You have to do this because currently in the United

Stopping Shell Companies And Family Splits

SPEAKER_00 23:30

States, like a corporation could just own like a million homes. Right. And then uh, or or sorry, uh, somebody could be like, oh, I'm gonna like say you have three children and your wife, you could be like, My wife owns two homes, my child owns two homes, my other child owns two homes, I own two homes. Right. Like each one of them could be like I only own two homes, but really as a family, they own like $50 million or $100 million in real real estate wealth. So you have to make a beneficiary registry, which then groups people by family. So you'd actually create these sort of, anyways, Australia already does it, and a few states already do things like this. But basically, for every property, there needs to be a human being who is the primary beneficiary of that property.

SPEAKER_02 24:15

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 24:16

Otherwise, corporations can make like all these shell corporations. Like, for example, I could be like a holding company that spins up like a hundred LLCs, and each LLC only owns one corporation, like one home. And then now I only get each of those LLCs pays taxes only for one home. So they avoid it. Right. So you'd have to provide an actual benefit, a human beneficiary. So then I would have to say, actually, I'm the primary beneficiary of all these hundred homes. And then I would get hit with the property tax of all the homes, no matter how many LLCs I spun up and how many holding companies and shell companies I created. So there's a few, uh, a few little things that that would have to be done just to make it feasible tax-wise, but but that's the that's all you need to do, really. Yeah. Okay. Other way you had more questions.

SPEAKER_02 25:05

Next question. Are we uh I mean, we talked about Disney earlier. Are we including commercial real estate? Like, oh my god, absolutely. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 25:13

Oh my god, yes. Businesses must pay more. And commercial real estate, we have a real problem with too much commercial real estate and not enough housing. Well, one of the reasons that is is because there's no tax, the taxes are so low.

SPEAKER_02 25:25

Yeah, and companies can really exist for a long time, like you're saying, like and get to be like yeah, old big hundred-year-old companies, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 25:35

And then you just yeah, I mean, corporations have the benefit of not dying, which means there's no way we can just treat them the same. That's crazy. Right. Um, so yeah, this was actually Tom Steyr, who actually just got knocked out of the race uh for first for governor, although he wouldn't have been knocked out if we used if we were to use ranked choice voting. So the only reason he got knocked out was because he was third place, and if there was ranked choice voting, the Republican would have gotten uh he would have just stayed in the race, and who knows? He might have when when the other people, like when Katie Porter got knocked out, her voters probably would have gone mostly to Steyr. So Katie Perry was a was a spoiler to Steir's winning. So if we instead of doing this, you know, first two primary system, if instead we just did one vote, ranked choice, or we could have done the primaries with ranked choice and then a general with whatever runoff, uh with a rate with not ranked choice, doesn't matter at that point, then Steyer probably would have won because Katy Perry's or Katie Perry, Katie, Katie Porter's voters were mostly second choice Steyr. So, anyways, basically we got the wrong person is gonna be governor, and it's all because we don't because we're still doing this one first choice, one yeah. Yes, or in this case, we did a kind of weird California does this weird thing where it's top two of the primary, no matter what party they're in, the top two go head to head. Yeah, and so it's a Republican and Democrat, which is stupid because in California, the death the Cal the Republican can't win. So it's stupid. It basically means that the Republican the Democrats right. So what happens is the Republicans all band together and vote for one person just to be a spoiler against the the other, the Democrat. They want to spoil the Democratic election so that you get someone that people don't actually have a mandate. Anyways, we need ranked choice voting for the whole state of California, especially for the governor's race, and at least in the Democratic primaries, it should be ranked choice voting. It's crazy. Um, and I don't just say that because I supported Steyr. I say that in principle, even if I didn't support Steyr, like for example, I'm supporting ranked choice voting in California in San Francisco, even though I don't support Lori. I don't think Lori is very great, but I I would have preferred London Breed. But, you know, even Breed, I don't really love. I don't really love these guys, but I support ranked choice voting no matter what. Anyways, in this case, it would have gone towards, I think, my guy. So I I am a bit doubly burned. Um, but anyways, yeah. My my wait, I got off point here. I got off kind of anyways, progressive progressive property taxes.

SPEAKER_02 28:20

Well, no, my my my my my third and final question I was gonna say is if it if it's also for commercial real estate, does that commercial real estate? Does that include like a giant apartment building? And does a landlord then raise everyone's rent because of it? Or or do you does this?

SPEAKER_00 28:36

Yeah, so this is so this is what people so this is what people are gonna say. Oh, you're gonna you're gonna this is gonna raise rent. You know, this so we have to talk about the you're being so generous because of course you are in aligned already with taxing the wealthy and taxing wealth and yeah, progressive, more progressive, steeply progressive tax schemas. But we have to think

Rent Fears And Capital Flight Claims

SPEAKER_00 28:55

really critically, like what are the most virulent opposition who have a lot of money and who can get their, you know, there will be Washingtonists and you know, this will be all over the country, national news. California is agreeing progressive income tax because it's taxed wealthy and fixing their housing crisis and blah, blah, blah. And the wealthy will come down really hard on it.

SPEAKER_02 29:14

So what will they need to leave, like like in New York when everyone's like, oh, we're every rich person's gonna leave as soon as Mandami is elected. That's like, no, exactly. Right.

SPEAKER_00 29:23

Turns out New York's still New York. Right. So that that's true. They'll say they'll leave, and of course they won't. They will say that there'll be capital flight. So, you know, Jeff Bezos is we're gonna, he's our whipping boy for this talk, you know, but a lot of people, you know, they're thinking of investing another $25 million in the real estate of California. Well, instead, they go invest that real estate in Miami. That's always the whip, that's always the kind of go-to California, you know, Florida Republican low tax environment.

SPEAKER_01 29:53

Right.

SPEAKER_00 29:53

They'll go to Miami instead, or they'll go to Alabama, it has a half percent income, you know, property tax. And they won't invest that next 25 million, or they'll sell half their real estate prop portfolio in California and they'll they'll move all that money to Montana or whatever, they'll move to some other state. And that's the day, that's what people say, oh, capital flight. So then you have to ask the question what will the effect of capital flight be on California? And the answer is almost nothing, right? If a wealthy person buys $25 million worth of real estate, it doesn't really create any jobs.

SPEAKER_01 30:29

That's just real estate just sits there. It just sits there, right?

SPEAKER_00 30:34

Okay, so it doesn't really create any jobs. They when they leave, they're not destroying anything, right? When they sell the homes, they don't like blow them up, right? Right? The homes, the properties, the assets which are valuable are still there. They're in California. They can't be put into a uh like a like a purse and brought away from California. So if people leave, all that does is free up housing stock and free up real estate for people who in California who who are dedicated to California, who are sort of patriotically Californian, who do want to operate businesses and operate homes and operate buildings in California.

SPEAKER_02 31:15

Presumably there are just as many people to take the place of whoever leaves. If not, the other argument is that, like, no, everyone's gonna leave and it's gonna drive down those housing prices. I'm like, well, then that's a domino effect that seems to work to lower eventually lowering everyone's houses, which means more affordable housing for everyone overall. That's right. At the expense of one $25 million mansions, you know, like top value.

SPEAKER_00 31:42

Right. Exactly. So the point is people will say, okay, the buildings are still there, but the prices are gonna go down. It's like, well, that's kind of what we were trying to do. Right. If you want housing to be more affordable, you kind of need the how the prices to come down. Yeah, right.

unknown 31:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:57

So in order for the price, and at what prices are gonna come down the most? Super wealthy properties and Crimea River, if a bunch of multimillionaires' properties come down by 40 or 30 percent, right? The the properties that cost the affordable properties won't price won't come down barely at all. Actually, there'll be a ton of demand for those properties, uh, because especially if you if you lower the taxes on those, which you do, because you say for the first half a million or or maybe even more, the first $700,000 worth of property, you pay zero taxes for life. Right. Because or maybe you lower it to the Hawaiian level, maybe it's just 0.25%. Very low, extremely low tax on the first $500,000 of your of your property, right? Zero is not really fair because if you can afford any property, you're still somewhat, you know, you're somewhat well off. Yeah, of course. Also, it does cost something to the public to have a home serviced by roads and you know, you know, like serviced by the mail, and you know, firefighters will come and out the fire if the house is on fire, and you know, and the police have to protect that property from you know robbers and things, you know. So there is some, so we probably shouldn't go down to zero, but you know, 0.25, maybe the lowest in the country, 0.1%, 0.25, 0.2%, you know, and then you ramp it up as you go higher. Anyways, so what it'll do is it'll it'll cool off the top, the top luxury markets. Yeah, it'll hype, it'll it'll increase demand at the lower rates, uh, which is exactly what you want. So people might say, on average, this is what this is what people would do who are against this. They'll say the total average housing, the value of a house is coming down in California because of this. Like, yeah, because averages include the multimillionaire mansions. But if you do a segmentation and you take, for example, the bottom 90% of houses by value, I doubt that those prices will come down very much at all. Maybe a little bit. But that's again, that's fine. It's fine for houses to come down a little bit in price in California, where they've been going up by 5% a year for 50 years. Like it's okay for them to come down a little bit. Uh, and you could also bring this in slowly. You could roll this in very slowly. You could start with the tax very low, and then later you could by by a new law, you could like ramp it up more. So you could go from like switch over to the system, but have a very soft, gentle progressive income, you know, progressive property tax. And then later you could be like, this works well. Let's ramp up the top end. Let's like make it 3% for the top, you know, the top 50 million or whatever.

SPEAKER_02 34:38

Yeah, be willing to move the sliders until it until it's right.

SPEAKER_00 34:43

So you could start off where the sliders sort of don't really change much at all, and maybe they just bring in a little more taxes from the wealthy. And then later you could be like, that really works, crank it up to more. Um, so yeah, you could start off with a little bit less disruptive structure. But yeah, so the opponents to this are gonna say capital flight, I would answer that doesn't matter, especially because it's capital flight of the wealthy, the wealthy's real estate dollars, which don't matter at all. And then working people will have more access to homes, which is great, and uh because their taxes will be lower. And commercial real estate, people say, Oh, the commercial real estate will fly from this from the countr from the state. It's like it's like I mean, it doesn't really matter. Commercial real estate already is mostly empty because of COVID. Like it should all be like converted into housing, anyways. So you could actually take some of this money that you make from the progressive income, progressive

Converting Empty Offices Into Housing

SPEAKER_00 35:40

property tax, and you could say we're setting aside, you know, 10 billion a year to converting real office real estate into housing because we live in a post-internet post-COVID, you know, Zoom world where people want to work from home three days a week. Well, guess what? You don't need as many offices if people work from home three days a week or two days a week or 100%, you know. Um and so you need to convert, you know, 50,000, you know, 500,000 square feet of downtown San Francisco office real estate needs to be turned into housing. And that's very expensive. And there's the government can pay for it, then it's great.

SPEAKER_02 36:16

For some of the commercial, like for some of the retail stuff, there's still people here who utilize and need things, and so there's still a useful, you know, like goods are still needed in some regards, and some like grocery stores are still going to be very much, you know, food and different things that you can't just order online and have shipped in a whatever timeline.

SPEAKER_00 36:38

Well, you can with grocery stores.

SPEAKER_02 36:40

Oh, that's true. I guess bad choice of example. Yeah, that's true.

SPEAKER_00 36:43

You can but I just mean I just mean office space. In San Francisco is downtown. There's like 75% office space and 25% housing. That was a huge, huge, huge policy and market mistake to do that. They never should have done that. That was a mistake, and it's gonna cost somebody money to fix. And you know who it should cost? Wealthy people who bought, who decided, who said to the polit, who own the politicians, who pay for their campaigns and said, yes, build a bunch of, give us the rights and the laws to build a ton of office space downtown and don't allow much housing to be built. And I'm going to then go and pay to build all this office space. It was a bad investment. Right. It was just dumb. It was not smart. It's like if you bought a bunch of, you know, whatever. Like if you bought a bunch of oil, you know, right before, or you sold a bunch of oil right before the oil price went way up. Like you're just bad at investing. You're just bad at predicting the future. And the rest of us don't have to pay the price. You have to pay the price. If you make a bad investment, it's on you. It's not on the rest of us. So charging a progressive property tax, that especially on commercial real estate, if that forces a bunch of people to like dump their commercial real estate, then great. The city can buy up that commercial real estate for fire sale and use the public funds from the progressive income tax to turn it into housing and sell it back to the people or or or or uh or just run it as as as uh like Mamdani is doing. You know, they're building 200,000 units of public housing. That means the city is the landlord for 200,000 units. Like you could do that in San Francisco too. The city could buy up a bunch of downtown office space, at a loss, turn it into housing and operate it as affordable housing downtown in perpetuity. That'd be fantastic. That would immediately bring back downtown. There would be, you know, 25,000 more people living downtown. That would make the downtown wonderful. There would be so much going on, you know. Uh, you can also do a lot of things with these buildings when their prices come down. Like if the prices are so high that only VC-backed startups and like tech companies can afford the square footage, then you can't have things like dentists' offices and art art galleries and you know, studios and things inside these commercial real estate buildings. But if the prices bottom out and become, you know, cheap, then you can. Someone could buy up the building for fire sale, whatever price, and then they could rent out and say, Oh, the people can use this real estate as a flexible space. Like you want to build a dental office in here, great. You want to put an art studio on a floor? Fantastic. It only costs, you know, 800 bucks a month for a whole floor of this building, and it's all just white walls. You can put up an art studio or an art gallery, or you can have a dance club, or whatever, you know, whatever. Obviously, the you know, the code has to instead of one model. You want to build a school where everything's a package. Instead of just text attacks or whatever. Right, right, exactly. So, anyways, I so and there might be downstream effects of this to like the commercial, you know, bond market and you know, loans and banks and stuff. But again, I think you can use the money from this progressive income tax to create a soft landing for that kind of stuff. And and if there is a hard landing, I still say who takes the haircut? It's the wealthy people who decided to make a bad investment by building too much commercial real estate in the downtowns of cities. That was a stupid investment. They need to take a haircut for that, not the rest of us. Right. And that's just capitalism. That's not socialism, right? That's capitalism. You make a bad investment, you're the bag holder. You buy Bitcoin at 120,000, you're the bag holder, not us, you know, not the public.

SPEAKER_02 40:34

Let let me run the thing by you that I saw on social media. It's not my idea, but I'm curious what your thoughts are on it. This is uh like a it's saying, we don't how about if we made no billionaires allowed, and then you can make $999

Billionaire Caps Versus Wealth Taxes

SPEAKER_02 40:50

million, and then that's it. Like if you get to a billion after you get to a billion, it's like you won, you're good. Everything else you generate 100%. Exactly. Everything else you generate just goes back to to into the public coffers, and when you go below a billion, you can start earning again, but like just take it as a win and you're fine, and then everything, you know, the yeah. What how does that strike you, or what do you think on that? Sounds like you've heard this before.

SPEAKER_00 41:18

Um yeah, no, I don't I don't think so that's not a very good way to do it seems very simplistic.

SPEAKER_02 41:25

It seems super simplistic.

SPEAKER_00 41:26

Yeah, that's not that's not the right way to do it.

SPEAKER_02 41:29

Um but in theory, I mean, people are like, oh well, if you take away a billionaire's ability to make money, then they're gonna lose all their motivation to I don't think that's a few things.

SPEAKER_00 41:40

A few things is one is uh a few things. One is why a billion? A billion is already way too much money. Like $999,999,999 is still way too much insane amount of money. So I think that's already still too much. I think something should kick in before then. So, you know, the better the best the best the best answer is really what Bernie Sanders already proposed, but people of course never talk about. Um, but it's the the the true the real solution, which is a progressive wealth tax. The reason we're not talking about that here is because Bernie Sanders already said it, this solution, this podcast for a new solution. Right. But I can review his thing, which is yeah, which his thing is, you know, every dollar you own over it's something like $10 million, you pay a 2% tax on per year. So if you have $10 million, you pay nothing. This tax doesn't touch you at all. So if you own $10 million in stocks and bonds and you know insurance policies and blah blah blah, all the financial instruments you can own, futures, commodity futures, etc. You pay nothing. So I I mean that's like 99, 95% of people, 99% of people will never have $10 million to their name. So this doesn't affect 99% of people. It's funny because people still fight, fight against it, even though it's it doesn't touch anyone. What it does though is that you say if you have every if you have over $10 million, then every dollar over $10 million, you pay 2% of that a year to the government. So if you have $20 million, you have $10 million of taxable, you pay 2% of $10 million, which is $200,000. So you have to if you have to sell some stocks to pay that, then you have to sell some stocks and pay for that. I mean, it's just the way it works. But if you only have $20 million, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:25

If you only have $10 million in one dollar, then you pay 20% or you pay 2% on that one dollar. You only pay you're like you, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 43:35

Like right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're paying yeah, yeah, yeah. If you if you have two if you have $10 million in one dollar, then you only pay two cents tax. But you still are someone who owns ten million dollars of wealth in America. Huge amount of wealth, yeah. So peep you know, and then but then when you get to like fifty million, it goes to three percent. And when you get to a hundred million, it goes to four percent. When you get to two hundred and fifty million, it goes to five percent. And we get and when you get to what you want to do is when you get It to a billion, you get to eight percent. So the reason why that is a good cutoff is because markets markets generally return on average eight percent return. Okay. So what you're basically saying is for every dollar you have over a billion dollars, we're going the government is not going to take that dollar, but it's gonna take every dollar that dollar makes in the market.

SPEAKER_01 44:26

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:27

So if you can somehow get growth above eight percent, and you can like keep hoarding even more wealth than a billion dollars, you know, it's like good on you. I don't know, sure. Like that's kind of amazing, you know. Uh, but the government is gonna take like what the market average rate of growth would be, is gonna go not to you, but to the public. Because the presumption is you basically there's no way you could make that money. You're putting an excessive burden. Billionaires have put an incredibly excessive burden on the country, right? Their trucks run on the streets, they're you know, they're what they do is an incredible burden on the society, shape public policy to their to the best thing for them, not for everybody. Right. Yeah, we definitely got to get yeah, Citizens United, which Hawaii and Montana are actually getting rid of, they're trying to get rid of some of Citizens United.

SPEAKER_02 45:25

Even just any part of like they are like, we can make data centers here because we paid money for lobbyists to do, you know, like right, right, right, right, right.

SPEAKER_00 45:34

Well, progressive progress so yeah, so anyways, so that's the kind of Bernie, and I think the right, you know, Warren says there should just be a two percent tax on wealth above 50 million. So hers is simpler, it's just like a flat tax on wealth above 50 million, which again touches like less than one, it's like less than a fraction of 1% of people have over $50 million. It's like it's so much money. It's like crazy.

SPEAKER_02 45:59

Is is it just a pie in the sky dream that any version of this can get, you know, because there's so many like wealthy interests and money involved in politics.

SPEAKER_00 46:11

Yeah, but they don't they don't vote. There aren't we have a democracy and they don't they don't have the votes. We have the votes, the people have the votes. So I think what'll happen is other countries will adopt it. It'll work really well for those countries, and then America, the the the middle class, like the white middle class, is gonna be proletarianized, which it already has been for the past 30 or 40 years. We've been proletarianized. So we've been our wealth has been essentially stolen from us and given to the wealthy, right? Like, like you're not like people aren't as wealthy as their parents, like millennials aren't as wealthy as their boomer parents, right? Why aren't they? Because the wealthy have like stolen that money from them through schemas, you know, through schemes. And so the the the the middle class are is gonna be proletarianized. And when it gets proletarianized, first demagogues will come like Trump and say, Oh, it's immigrants, but it's not immigrants, you know. So all we need is someone to come for people to come along and say, it's the billionaires. And that message is gonna start to resonate with people as they get more proletarianized. So you're seeing this right now with Graham Plattner in Maine. Graham Plattiner is just a, you know, he would have been a Republican 50 years, 40 years ago. You know, 40 years ago, x V X-war veteran oyster farmer in Maine would be a Republican. He'd vote for George W. Bush, and you know, he'd vote for George Bush, and he'd vote for, you know, Bob Dole, you know, he'd be Republican. But because his community has been so proletarianized through the last 40 years of neoclassical economics, you know, neoliberal uh economic development, right? That now he and his whole community, he says this. He says, everywhere I go in Maine, everyone understands. They understand that they're just getting screwed and robbed. And that's got to end. And I'm gonna end it by like taxing the wealthy. That's what he says. I'm gonna make a tax plan that taxes the wealthy and claws back that money and gives it to regular working people. So now he's not a Republican anymore. He's like a Bernie Krat Democrat, like a populist Democrat. And that's what's gonna happen. He's just he's the future of things to come. He he's what will happen in a bunch of states. Montana, same thing. They they've been proletarianized to the point where they and it's just not true that it's immigrants. It's not immigrants. Immigrants aren't making America poor. It's clearly the billionaires, you know, and and and and and and automate and automation. And so, and to some extent, globalization, globalization, automation, and billionaires, which is all just neoliberalism. Neoliberalism says maximize trade with other countries, it says outsource all the jobs, it says lower taxes on the wealthy, it says, you know, trickle down economics, it says, you know, and so it's all just neoliberalism that needs to be is what's going to come under fire. So all we need people to realize is, oh, it's not immigrants, it's not brown people, it's not the Dems, it's not woke trans, you know, whatever trans. It's the billionaires and it's the wealthy. And if we just tax them, we can build a much better society where where if you work, you can live comfortably and buy a home and have health insurance so your kids can be safe and educated, and you know, you can have nice things that you like, lipstick, and right. You don't have to be like some this, you don't have to like wear sackcloth and eat dust. You know, it's not communism. We're not gonna do a communism. It's not the great, it doesn't instantly become the Great Depression. Right. You just have like the dust bowl, right? So that's what'll happen. I I think this will happen. I'm I'm pretty optimistic uh that this is what's gonna happen. But it takes people realizing what neoliberalism is, how it's been just basically colonized. Basically, what happened was is we were colonizing the rest of the world, and then in the 60s and 70s, we basically couldn't colonize them anymore because they fought back. Like they said, you can't colonize us anymore. So then in the 80s, they were like, okay, let's start colonizing our own people. So the wealthy have basically been colonizing our own people, they've been extracting wealth from Americans since the 80s, and that's just called neoliberalism. And so we need to just stop the colonization of our own working people by the wealthy, and then all the people in America will become a lot wealthier. So it's not like we're gonna become poorer. The stock market will go down, but the stock market's not owned by very many people, you know. Uh, what'll go up is access to healthcare, access to housing, you know, safety, public safety because crime will go down, so places will be safety, right? You'll work less, you know. So you work four-day work week or three-day work week, and you'll have plenty of money and child care, and your life will be lovely. And you can start a business and be an artist and have freedom of speech. And you know, we're not giving up anything. We're not gonna give up anything about being an American. The only thing we're gonna give up is having overlord oligarch billionaires who get to decide everything and take all of our wealth from us, you know. So that's that's that's kind of the proposal. And and Graham Plattiner is gonna be, I think, the the winner. Uh, hopefully, he wins his Senate race and uh and becomes a real voice in the Senate for this kind of thing. Because he's not gonna pull any punches. I mean, he's just like he doesn't have anything to lose because he's been proletarianized completely.

SPEAKER_02 51:28

I think I don't know the politics of Maine. Is Maine like a strong liberal or conservative state, or does it go back and forth depending on the other?

SPEAKER_00 51:35

Maine is like Wisconsin. It votes Republican in local elections, but for president, it usually swings Democrat. So it's kind of like these working class people with a strong union background. And so because of the strong like union and working class, they generally go Democrat in the presidential, the presidential race. But in local elections, they vote more Republican. And for a long time, Susan Collins, who is the current senator, uh, one of the current senators, she's a Republican. But when she runs in her election, she always says that she's like a centrist, moderate Republican, right? Like kind of like more close to being a Democrat, but she's real, but then Republican for like whatever. She caucuses with the Republicans. But then if you look at her voting record, she's just a rubber stamp for Republicans. She's just a hardcore MAGA. She, you know, she just votes right along the line with Trump and these hardcore MAGA people. So it's a lie, obviously. You know, how do you tell the politicians lying? Their lips are moving, right? But you know, so she, but the idea is she's very old, she's very vulnerable right now. And Graham Platiner is really sweeping into power. And so the thought is that he'll win. He's also not like a woke, you know, he doesn't have like blue hair, he's not like some like blue-haired, like lesbian. No offense to blue-haired lesbians, they're fine, they're great. But in Maine, that wouldn't fly, right? That wouldn't fly if he was like a Somal, like if he was like, you know, Somali immigrant or something. It wouldn't really work in Maine. But he's just like literally like a native son, salt of the earth Mainer. He lives on the street that he grew up on. He's a like three, I think he did three tours, Iraq and Afghanistan, two in uh one in Afghanistan, two in Iraq, or two in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. I mean, the guy's like, the guy's like, I mean, he's like, you know, he's like the most American thing ever. He's like, you know, he's like apple pie, American guy. So that's gonna really, that's gonna really fly in Maine.

SPEAKER_02 53:29

Yeah, I just learned about him this week after the whole like thing with uh with his primary. So uh the introduction.

SPEAKER_00 53:37

Everyone should give him money because the Republicans are gonna pour out literally hundreds of millions of dollars to try to stop him from all around the country, are gonna be pouring money into Maine to s to to to fight him. So we all need to like pour in money to to help him. So everyone should go and give money to Graham Platt. He's I met him, he's awesome. I met him. He came to San Francisco and I I went to his event and I got to there's a picture of me with my like arm around him. He's so cool. He's such an awesome guy. He's really he's not John Fetterman. I should say that. People are worried that he's like John Fetterman. He's like this kind of guy who's like a working class guy who's then gonna kind of turn to be more like Republican when he gets into office. That is not what Graham Platiner is or what he's going to do.

SPEAKER_02 54:21

That's not what you got when you met him at all.

SPEAKER_00 54:24

Absolutely not. And there's there's evidence too. Like Fetterman is was trying to get into politics for years. You know, he was kind of power hungry. He was really trying to get there. Grant Platiner was just like living his life as an oyster farmer. You wouldn't know you didn't want to be in politics. He was the harbor master

Populism, Proletarianisation, And Maine Politics

SPEAKER_00 54:40

of a harbor in Maine. Like that was it, you know. But then people came to him, Bernie, sort of Bernie sort of people came to him and said, We want you to run for Senate in Maine. We think you've got, you know, what it takes, just from who he was. And he could speak. He's good at public speaking. And so he was like, okay, he was like, no, he said, no, I'm not gonna do that. And then they came back to him again with a more of a plan, and he was like, Okay, that sounds more reasonable. Let's try to launch. And if with the launch goes well, I'll stay in the race. And then the launch was like awesome. He like blew up right away. It's like uh so and now he's just been an unending successes one after the next.

SPEAKER_02 55:18

It's like a modern day Mr. Smith goes to Washington situation.

SPEAKER_00 55:22

It's exactly that. Except for Mr. Smith is like a hard-boiled manner oyster farmer instead of like a charming sort of Jimmy's teacher or bourgeoisie. Yeah, yeah. That's more like James Tallarico, who's another sort of he's the similar thing in in Texas of a kind of proletarianized Texans uh realizing that it's not immigration that's making America crappy, but billionaires and neoliberal, you know, mango people.

SPEAKER_02 55:48

Good. So we need younger and uh more uh aware people in the positions because it feels like we have uh an older guard who is sort of running on autopilot and it is for restrating.

SPEAKER_00 56:02

And what they need is new solutions from the multiverse.

SPEAKER_01 56:06

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 56:07

Woo! Boom, all right, circle circle. Tax wealth not work. I like it. Call out to my to my pal uh Gary, Gary's Economics, yeah, and uh and Barry's Economics too. If you guys check out Barry's Economics, Barry's Economics is a YouTube channel that started just copying Gary's economics, but Gary's Economics like shouts him out and like loves him, and so he gets like hundreds of thousands of views.

SPEAKER_02 56:36

Copying like his format, or I mean not just creating the exact same videos, right?

SPEAKER_00 56:40

Just totally copying, but I mean he does his own topics, but the whole thing is like Felicist taxwalt not work, and he's just like a foot soldier, he just is yeah, because because and that's what Gary said. Other people should just start more of these channels because there's clearly a demand for them. Yeah, start more, and I'll call you out and shout you out. And so this guy, Barry, who was like a homeless guy or something, like he's just this guy, he started Barry's economics, and now he has like 500,000 followers on YouTube. So it's like like really, really, really grew fast. So, yeah, you guys can go check out Barry's economics too. I don't like him as well as Gary, but Barry's cool. Barry's cool. He's more like um, he's like a little more rough around the edges because he doesn't have like a master's degree in economics from from Oxford, like like Barry's like like like uh Gary does Coke Zero.

SPEAKER_01 57:29

The Gary's the Coke classic.

SPEAKER_00 57:33

I would say Barry is like I would say Gary is like you bought a Coca-Cola at a bar and it had like ice in a straw. Barry's like you found a Coca-Cola on the ground as you were walking and you just took a picture of anything.

SPEAKER_01 57:50

But somehow the Gary's better perfect announcement, you know, something more yeah, a higher category. All right, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 58:00

Well, I love it. Anyways, go check it out. Good stuff. Yeah, all right, guys. Very nice. Thanks for another one, property prop.

SPEAKER_00 58:04

We could do a progressive property tax. Yeah, that would change California. Maine could do it, Hawaii could do it, Montana could do it. It would be a major fix for for housing, the housing problem we all have, and uh and a bunch of other problems too.

SPEAKER_02 58:15

So all you governors listening, get on it.

SPEAKER_00 58:18

Yeah, we have we have pretty strong governor listenership.

SPEAKER_02 58:21

So 50 out of 50 if I check. 50 off easy.

SPEAKER_00 58:25

Apple Apple Podcast gives us a governor's plus the governors of other provinces of the other rest of the world.

SPEAKER_02 58:30

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Big governors. Big governors. Shout out to the Govs. What's up, Govs? Thanks for doing that.

SPEAKER_00 58:38

We got Govs in the chat. All right, we've gone on two live. Such a long episode.