Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog
On Joe Rogan, Peter Thiel has an interesting answer to conservatives wondering why California hasn’t collapsed already: California is essentially Saudi Arabia.
• Joe Rogan: “California just jacked their taxes up to 14[% at the highest marginal rate], what was it, 14.4[%]?”
• Peter Thiel: Something like that, yeah. 14.3[%] I think.”
• JR: “You want more money for doing a terrible job, and having more people leave for the first time ever.”
• PT: “But it gets away with it.”
• JR: “I know! People are forced with no choice. What are you going to do?”
• PT: “There are people at the margins who leave, but the state government still collects more and more in revenues. You get 10% more revenues and 5% of the people leave you still increase the amount of revenues you’re getting. It’s inelastic enough that you’re actually able to increase the revenues.”
• PT: “This is sort of the the crazy thing about California. There’s always sort of a right-wing or libertarian critique of California that it’s such a ridiculous place, it should just collapse under its own ridiculousness and it doesn’t quite happen.”
• PT: “The macroeconomics in it are are pretty good. 40 million people, the GDP is around 4 trillion. It’s about the same as Germany with 80 million, or Japan with 125 million. Japan has three times the population of California same GDP means one-third the per capita GDP, so there’s some level on which California as a whole is working, even though it doesn’t work from a governance point of view.”
• PT: “The rough model I have for how to think of California is that it’s kind of like Saudi Arabia. They have a crazy religion, wokeism in California, Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. You know not that many people believe it, but it it distorts everything.”
More:
https://www.battleswarmblog.com/?p=59739https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH9yHm2soaM
