Cory L

Ro. Back again? I've still got the screenshot of your last one, you know. The "hoarding wealth" post. The one you deleted. Don't worry, I'm keeping it somewhere safe. Like a teacher keeps the first draft. And look at this one. You quote-tweeted Bernie's bottom-50% post. THE bottom-50% post. The one that got community noted. The one where Bernie's own staff director had to come out and admit the numbers were the Fed's data "minus" the family car, the refrigerator, and Social Security. That one. Ro, you looked at a post with a correction label stapled to it and thought, "Yes. This is the one I want to put my name on." That's like seeing a "WET PAINT" sign and leaning your whole back on the wall to check. Okay. Pull up a chair, Congressman. You walked into a physics classroom today, and I've got a lot to cover. "989 billionaires are now worth 22% of our GDP." Ro, I teach this exact mistake to fifteen-year-olds in the first week of school. It's called mixing up your units. GDP is a RATE. It's how much the whole economy produces in ONE YEAR. Dollars per year. Net worth is an AMOUNT. It's the value of everything somebody owns, built up over a lifetime, sitting there right now. Dollars. Period. Comparing those two is like saying your car has driven 150,000 miles, and that's 2,500 times faster than the speed limit. It sounds like a big scary number. It means absolutely nothing. Miles aren't miles per hour. Wealth isn't GDP. If one of my freshmen turned that in on a lab, I'd circle the units in red, write "SEE ME," and give him a chance to fix it. You've been in Congress for ten years, Ro. You don't get the freshman discount anymore. And here's the funny part. You could make the same scary-sounding claim about ANY pile of wealth. All the homes in America are worth way more than one year of GDP. All the retirement accounts in America are worth way more than one year of GDP. Does that mean grandma's 401(k) is a "concentration crisis"? It just means things that last longer than a year are worth more than one year of output. That's not inequality, Ro. That's arithmetic. Your units are scrambled like a breakfast buffet at a cheap hotel, Congressman. "We have more wealth concentration than the gilded age." Oh, Ro. Ro, Ro, Ro. Let's actually do this one, because I love it. During the Gilded Age, John D. Rockefeller, ONE man, was worth roughly two percent of the entire American economy by himself, by most estimates. One guy. Two percent. Today, by your own number, 989 billionaires together add up to 22 percent. Divide that out, and the average billionaire today is about two-hundredths of one percent. Rockefeller, by himself, was roughly a HUNDRED TIMES bigger, relative to the economy, than your average modern billionaire. So the honest version of your tweet is: "Today, wealth is spread across almost a thousand billionaires instead of a handful of robber barons, and the biggest ones are smaller, compared to the economy, than Rockefeller was." That's the OPPOSITE of what you said. You took a picture of the fire hydrant and labeled it the fire. And while we're talking about the Gilded Age, do you know what working families had back then, Ro? No Social Security. No Medicare. No Medicaid. No minimum wage. No forty-hour week. Kids working in coal mines and textile mills. Most homes didn't have indoor plumbing or electricity. People died of things a dollar-store antibiotic fixes today. Today the bottom half of America has smartphones, cars, refrigerators, air conditioning, Medicaid, Social Security, and the internet in their pockets. Which, by the way, came from a lot of the same companies those billionaires built. In YOUR district. Apple. Nvidia. Google next door. Saying working families today have it worse than in the Gilded Age is an insult to every great-grandparent who worked twelve-hour days in a factory with no windows. You're comparing a rotary phone to an iPhone and complaining the iPhone has fewer buttons. You're a history book with half the pages torn out, Ro, and you're reading it upside down. "Tax California billionaires at 5% one time to pay for the healthcare of California kids." We've been over this, Ro, but some students need the lesson twice. Health care is a MONTHLY bill. Kids get sick every month. Kids need checkups every year. A one-time tax pays for one time. Then what? 2028 rolls around, the money's gone, and you're back on a poster asking for another "one-time" tax. A "one-time" tax from a politician is like a "one-time" potato chip. Nobody in human history has ever eaten just one. And a temporary pot of money for health care with a cliff at the end... wait. That's the COVID Obamacare subsidies. The ones you voted for in the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act. The ones DEMOCRATS put the expiration date on. Not one Republican voted for those bills. That cliff was yours, Ro. You built it once, watched families fall off it, and now you want to build another one in California and paint it with crayons so it looks like a playground. And "California kids." Ro, the Medicaid work requirements your side keeps screaming about are for able-bodied adults without young children. Parents of young kids are exempt. Kids aren't being asked to clock in anywhere. You put a child's face on a fight about whether a healthy thirty-year-old with no kids should work, study, or volunteer twenty hours a week. That's not compassion. That's using kids as a human shield for a bad tax. If you want to know why California's health care budget is in trouble, look in your own backyard. California put illegal immigrants on Medi-Cal, blew way past budget, had to borrow billions to keep it running, and then Newsom himself froze new enrollment. That's not a billionaire problem. That's a Sacramento-can't-do-math problem. And the money you'd actually get? The Hoover Institution found about 30 percent of the targeted wealth was already out of reach before the vote, because people and assets had already moved, and estimated something closer to 40 billion instead of the 110 billion headline. California's own Legislative Analyst's Office warned the state could lose income tax revenue every year from the people who leave. France, Sweden, and Germany all tried wealth taxes and backed out. Your plan has more leaks than a screen-door submarine, and you want to send California's kids out to sea in it. Even Gavin Newsom opposes this thing, Ro. GAVIN NEWSOM. When the governor who never met a tax he didn't love tells you this one's too much, you've officially wandered so far off the map that the map is filing a missing persons report. Now, about the man asking. Ro, you're one of the richest people in the entire United States Congress. Your household disclosures report assets somewhere between 69 million and more than 167 million dollars. Your disclosures have shown thousands of stock trades in your family's accounts. And Prop 40 draws the line at a billion. Just high enough to miss you. Just high enough to miss Bernie and his three houses. Just high enough to miss every single person standing on that rally stage. The people writing the tax ALWAYS draw the line one inch above their own heads. In 1913, the income tax was one percent and only hit the very richest Americans. They swore it would never touch the working man. Today it's taken out of every working paycheck in America before we ever see a dime. The line only moves one way, Ro. Down. Toward us. So here's my standing offer, and it's got your name all over it. I keep hearing Democrats cry about the rich while they ARE the rich. If you care so much about California kids' health care, you don't need a ballot measure, Ro. You've got a nine-figure household. File with the standard deduction. No itemizing. No trusts. No fancy accountant. Pay DOUBLE what the IRS says you owe. Post the return. Then cut a check to a children's clinic in Fremont and post that too. Do that, and I'll come to your rally in San Francisco myself. I'll even bring snacks. Until then, Ro, you're a man with a mouth full of cake leading a Weight Watchers meeting. You're a fire marshal juggling matches. You're a tour guide who's never left the bus. You're a GPS that keeps saying "you have arrived" in the middle of the ocean. And honestly? Your math is like a three-legged table. It looks fine right up until somebody puts something on it. Quinn's Law Number Six: facts are the enemy of liberalism. Mix up your units, cut out the cars and the Social Security, compare a thousand billionaires to one Rockefeller and get it backwards, and you can make any chart say anything. But the minute somebody puts the right units back on the graph, the whole argument falls over. Quinn's Law Number Twenty-Five: liberals are great at giving away other people's money. Never their own. Never, Ro. Not once. Not even a "one-time" check from a nine-figure household. But what do I know? I'm only a physics teacher who makes fifteen-year-olds label their units, and who apparently has to teach the same lesson to a member of Congress twice in one week. @TPUSA @JoJoFromJerz @atrupar @BernieSanders #MAGA #Trump #Veterans