Peak Prosperity - Kalama’s Tax Proposals Are Horrifying

Episode Date: August 29, 2024

At what line do we say someone’s forced labor crosses over from ‘voluntary’ to being a slave? Certainly that happens at 100% of one’s labor. I would submit that’s still true at 99%, and so now the argument is where exactly is that line?

The following is the audio version of a video released at peakprosperity.com. Visit peakprosperity.com to watch the video and to find other insightful content such as articles, discussion forums, and exclusive subscriber-only content. At what point does taxation turn into slavery? Is that at 100% of taking all of your salary, or is it at some lower number? Let's find out. Hello, everyone. Dr. Chris Martinson of Peak Prosperity here. And I'm casual because I'm about to go to the Limitless Conference in Dallas. So if you're there, hey, look me up, say hi, shake my hand. Can't wait to meet you. I just love meeting people at these conferences. This is Ken McElroy's big

conference, Limitless. It's awesome. RFK Jr. is going to be there. Robert Kiyosaki and many, many other awesome folks. And at the bottom of the totem pole, me. So it's all good. Hey, listen, I have to talk about this. Let's talk, let's look at this really quickly. So here we see that MJ Ultra Truth is saying here, look, why are we even paying taxes anymore? This is in California. Maybe you've heard about this, but this is a really important,

like it's the subtext. It's both the thing itself, but it's the subtext of what's actually being done to people in California. By the way, if you live in California, consider leaving unless unless you like being a tax donkey and you like being abused, then by all means, stay there and have a good time. But for everybody else, this is really astonishing to me that California is seeking to approve one hundred and fifty thousand dollar loans. And we know how many of those will probably get paid back for illegal. Now, MJ Truth Alter here is saying immigrants. I'm going to say migrants, OK, because an immigrant is somebody who goes through a process. It's very laborious. Fifty check boxes and processes and tests and vettings and all kinds of things have to happen.

Immigration is fine. Love immigration. Good stuff. People should be free to move wherever they want in the world. But the host countries ought to be free to say, maybe more of these people, less of those people. So that's what immigration is. It's no different than being a landlord. You get to choose.

Like, do I want these people renting my house or those people? I don't know. Maybe I should do some vetting, right? Let's do a background check maybe a reference check maybe a credit check you're going to do some things to make sure these are the kinds of people you want in your house i don't know why it would be any different at a country level but california has decided that what it wants to do is it wants to reward illegal migrants by giving them 150 000,000 low interest loans, right?

And California, as MJ Ultra Truth is already noting here, is already $70 billion in debt. And their solution is what? To help illegals buy homes? That's on one level. On another level, by having illegals buy homes, by definition, they are now in competition for what's already a very tight housing landscape, which means that if you're an American and you're a young family and you're here and you've been paying your taxes and you went to the school systems and you're part of the culture, well,

now you have to compete for higher house prices with these other people because it's just the law of supply and demand, supply and demand. Price curve, right? Price, supply, demand. It demand price curve right price supply demand it's a curve it's one of the oldest most axiomatic parts of um the financial landscape economic landscape out there so they're going to be more and more illegal people competing that means that by definition california has reached its democratic noodley appendage down into its populace and said, we want to reward these people and we think you should pay for it. Now, I don't know how you feel about that, but to me, that's demoralizing. It is disgusting. It's really just, I don't even know what, it makes me feel like I need to take a shower right away. And so, yeah,ia close to approving 150 000 loans for illegal

migrants to help purchase their homes because these are migrants these aren't people who came through the immigration process they came unmasked dipped under a wire that was held up by border patrol and here they are right probably given a free cell phone some some EBT cards, maybe some other money in an envelope. We don't know. Right. But for whatever whatever is going on here, this is not OK. Right. It should not be OK for anybody. Can you imagine if somebody showed up from the state and said, by the way, we see you have an extra bedroom there. You're going to have to allow this random person, literally a random person that we found coming across the border. They're now living in your house. Hopefully at some point you have to say enough is enough. Okay. So I think we should

be able to say enough. Now here's the context for this. California has a multi-billion dollar deficit in its budget, and it also has a lot of debt already. So let's look at this very quickly. We can see here. Yeah, they had a hundred billion dollar surplus three years ago. And I'm putting the air quotes up around that because actually what happened is the Federal Reserve printed up a lot of money and handed it to the federal government, who then threw it out there in the stimmy checks and threw it into the stock market. One or both of those parties probably did that behind the scenes through the plunge protection team because we wanted we just like everything going up and to the right. And because of that, there

were all these capital gains. And next, you know, California had a budget surplus, but not because its Democratic leadership was doing an exceptional fiscal job, being good stewards of the economic house of that state. It was just because there was all this free money being printed up by the Federal Reserve comes flooding in, creates all this inflation. But they're like, oh, we had $100 billion surplus because we are amazing. Right now, they're not amazing. Now, it looks like the budget deficit is careened off the rails. Newsom has proposed a $288 billion spending plan down from $311 billion. So they had to make some cuts in here, noting that New York, big as that state is, is $237 billion budget. And Texas and Florida spend far less annually, probably something to do with why people are flocking there. Just a guess, because you know what? People go and

capital goes to where they are treated best. Weird, right? At any rate, now they're looking at about a $45 billion deficit, and that's on top of all the debt they have. So California is going to be just going further into debt, running these deficits and sits down and goes, you know, maybe we ought to give illegal migrants $150,000 low interest loans from taxpayers. And if they don't pay them back, that's okay. We'll just write them off, cancel them. Okay, that is the story right now. And to just get into this though, let's look at this. So the Wall Street Journal, which has really, by the way, lost the thread as far as I'm concerned in a lot of very important ways, because what they should have done is they should have had some other people

weighing in on this particular article, right? Let me supersize this a little bit so we get a little bigger so we can see it. Okay. So this article, it came out on August 27th. It's about Kamala Harris's tax increases and cuts, whatever those are, take shape. And of course they have this very flattering picture of her, I don't know, getting ready to catch a basketball or something. We're not sure. Maybe a clue. We don't know. But they say here that her tax proposals pick up the unfinished business, right? The Biden administration pushing to raise taxes on corporations in-income households. And again, the definition of high income is going to creep down lower and lower over time because that's how these people roll. Oh, it's just

billion. It's a billionaire tax. Actually, we meant centimillionaire tax. Actually, 10 millionaire tax. Actually, it's a millionaire tax. Actually, it's a 500,000-year tax. Actually, it applies to everybody. That's how these things go. Consider that the income tax, when it first started in 1913, coincidentally with the founding of the Federal Reserve, or not so coincidentally, was 1%. Now let's take a look at where we're going here on this new tax stuff. Comes down right here. Under her plan, the top marginal income tax rate for individuals would climb to 44.6% across almost all income types. Now, there used to be a difference between how you're taxed on dividend income, capital gains, and things like that. And one of the things that we've talked

about a lot is that the federal government does not inflation adjust your capital gain. So consider if I buy a house in the year 1900 and then my grand great-grandchildren sell it in the year 2000, you're going to say, wow, you bought it for a thousand dollars and now you're selling it for $300,000. That's a $299,000 gain. Not if you inflation adjust it. It's actually probably a 0% gain. Why should the government be the party that can both create inflation and then tax you on the benefits you receive from that inflation? It's not. It's everything. When you're talking about capital gains, they have to be inflation adjusted or it's just crime. It's just a crime scene.

That's what we're talking about. So at any rate, top tax rate for individuals 44.6 now if you're in california i think you have unless they've changed it an additional 13.9 on top of that so we're closing in on 60 really quickly here now here's the question that i started with at what level of taxation does it become slavery? At 100%, right? You have to work all of your hours for somebody else under duress, because if you don't, give them 100% of what's coming from you, I guess the people with guns show up and take you off to prison.

So there's a punishment if you don't cough it up. So that's called slavery. We're all clear on that, right? When you have to provide 100% of your waking effort hours for somebody else's benefit, then you're a slave. What if it was 99%? I think we'd probably still say that feels a little slavey to me. 90%? At what point do we say, wow, where's that line?

Because there's a line. That's all we're establishing here is somewhere between 100% and 0%. There's a line we have to draw, and maybe you draw it differently than I do, but there's a line we draw where we say, oh, well, that's slavery. I submit to you that by the time you're spending 50% or more of your marginal income and sending it to the government and getting nothing back in return, here's the thing when i drive across the roads oh but chris your your taxes paid for the roads like well if they did then how come i have to pay tolls on all the major roads that i want to drive on

the bridges we built the bridge i still have to pay a toll so it feels kind of like i'm not sure that i get that oh well your taxes go to, well, educating students. No, that's my local property taxes. I got a different bone to pick around that, too, but okay. Oh, your taxes go to keeping the country safe. No, I don't know that sending $100 billion to Ukraine did anything to keep me safe or you safe, so I'm not buying that. Now, if I lived in one of these so-called socialist countries, I'm in Norway and I'm paying this exact same tax rate, 44.6% plus, plus, plus, right? Sales tax, state income tax, fees, permits, all this stuff. Everything I want to do requires an additional fee. It's kind of like, you know, we give 800 billion to the military and we're like, hey, now we'd like to fight a war. They're like, well, that's extra, right? Hey, here's 44.6% in taxes. And they're like, yeah, but you know, driver's license is extra. Registering your car is extra. Fishing license is extra. Building permits is extra. Everything's extra. What am I getting? That's what we should be asking at this point in time. put into something and we have a collective vision we agree on but we don't have good infrastructure in this country i don't even have reliable high-speed internet here that compares to anything you can find in the philippines like where's it going well it's all going to graft and corruption and we all know that so at some point when you are unwillingly having to donate to a pile of graft and corruption that does not benefit you. That's either we could call that the mob or we could call that the Pharaohs and I'm a slave.

That's what we're trending towards here. These are slave numbers right here, as far as I'm concerned. And that's what we should be focusing on. Not just like, oh, you know, is everybody paying their fair share? It's like, no, no, I know it's a fair share when I put in and then I receive back. I live in a safe, clean, well-run country that has good mass transit and all of that. If I'm paying 44.6%, I want free education, free health care, all those bennies that you get if you're in Iceland or Norway. We pay the same amount in and we get almost nothing back. So that's what we need to talk about. And that's

what we should be focused on. And those are the questions people ought to be asking in this particular cycle right now. So with that, thanks very much for listening to this. Everybody else who wants to hear the rest of the scouting report, all my subscribers, come on back to Peak Prosperity. I got a lot more to talk about, and we're going to be talking about Zuckerberg's non-apology apology and all the damage that that created and what comes next. With that, thanks very much for listening. See you next time. I'm off to go to Limitless. Again, if you see me there, come shake my hand.

Love to shake yours. With that, bye for now.