California went from 235B in 2022 with a surplus, to 317B with a deficit in 2025.
Budgets should be balanced, with smart long term planning and sensible spending. We should not resort to a special “billionaire tax” to fund our mismanaged budgets.
When our high speed rail runs out of funds (and triples in costs with little to show for it), do we slap another billionaire tax? When homeless spending goes missing and doesn’t make a dent, do we add another tax? When cal fair plan goes insolvent?
And then when they’re all gone, we go after the hundred millionaires.
This isn’t the solution. The solution is to fix tax loopholes, that generate sustainable income; with spending that is long term balanced and based on realistic interest rates.
Politicians generally don’t try to solve these hard long term problems, but put up short term patches that are incredibly harmful for the state.
Its incredibly simple - they want to get off the supply chain risk list.
Its very evident in his statement, he's trying very hard to clarify what that list means for corporations and downstream business with large commercial and strategic companies.
Imagine if Microsoft, Amazon, Google, etc decided that they don't want to ANY sort of minuscule risk (real or perceived) to their massive public sector business lines (via all their DoD DoJ NHS and other 3 letter agencies, state agencies, city and local municipals etc) - and decide to cancel their enterprise Anthropic licenses - which is a VERY possible scenario.
And these are the big players, theres a whole slew of medium and small players all with existing government contracts that need to tread carefully.
I think a major factor is politics - when China's leadership sets out to do something, they go out and get it done. Look at China's high speed rail (now more than the combined rest of the world), renewable energy growth, and their recent investment in chips. They commit to it, and make incredible progress - far outpacing everyone else. China's leadership seems to plan for the long term in infrastructure.
Compare that to something like the California High Speed Rail, or our every 4 year tug of war for elections (and mid term elections). Everything is short sighted "wins" for the next reelection, of one party vs another party, instead of making actual progress.
Its almost like when there is a good benevolent leadership in charge, for a long term, then progress comes much faster. (Singapore, China, ?)
Seeing a lot of these pop up more recently, but this has been happening for a decade now apparently. Isn't this the fault of Medicare itself, of not having routine checks and better processes for preventing these fraudulent claims at the source?
If only the big scams are being caught (and we don't know what % are being caught), there's likely a lot more going undetected.
Cribl | https://cribl.io/careers | REMOTE We have a lot of positions open. Backend, Frontend, SRE. Mostly a node.js shop. Hiring from senior to principal roles.
Cribl | https://cribl.io/careers | REMOTE
We have a lot of positions open. Backend, Frontend, SRE. Mostly a node.js shop. Hiring from senior to principal roles.
SNCF was one of the early bidders for this project, proposing the I5 route. They later pulled out from the politics of the Central Valley line in 2011, and went on to successfully implement high speed rail in Morocco instead - which went live in 2018.
Here we are 8 years after they finished a different project with nothing. American infrastructure at its finest.
Insurance companies are for profit. They run the analysis of how much they need to charge to break even, and aim to charge above that. If they charge too high, customers will look at the alternatives and switch to a competitor.
You can replace "insurance" with any other business, the whole of capitalism is built upon this. Every stock on the stock market is trying to "provide returns to their investors" - each one is as guilty as the next - theres nothing special about insurance companies.
If the argument is that insurance should be a federally provided service, then we must have a different conversation. Look at the FAIR plan. They are government created, and will get wiped out because of these fires, possibly because they weren't charging enough to begin with (and taxpayers will now need to bail them out). The math doesn't change whether its state backed or privately backed. If a home, on average, gets burned down every X years, then the insurance premium needs to be adjusted to be able to cover that.
And here is the crux of the problem - if you take away the free market aspect of being able to adjust prices, and get forced to sell a product/service for less than what you need to, there will be a loss somewhere, in this order of operations:
1. loss at the insurance company --> insurance company goes broke or leaves the state
2. loss at the FAIR plan --> FAIR plan reserves get wiped out
3. loss at the state level --> taxpayers need to bail the situation out.
Id argue that letting the free market work (at layer 1 above) is the proper way about it. If a house burns down every 10 years, let insurance charge 10% of that cost, because that is the actual risk involved in the system. House prices will naturally come down to reflect that reality of risk.