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.
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