Most businesses over a certain size also waste a f**kton of money. The larger the organization, the harder it is to avoid doing so.

I told you exactly how this practice creates waste. At the end of the year, unspent budget goes away, so the people to whom the budget was assigned look for ways to spend it. Most of that spending was not specifically budgeted for, or else the stuff would have been bought earlier in the cycle. And if it were strictly necessary, it would have been explicitly budgeted, rather than being bought because there just happened to be money left over.

What percentage of that spending provides a real benefit? There's no way to know, because they didn't have to provide a formal justification and ask for more funding to cover it, since there was money left over from something else that didn't cost as much as expected.

The fact that you can't see government waste tells me that either you're not looking closely enough to see the problems or you're benefitting from the waste.

One of the core problems with government waste comes from the budgeting process itself, wherein money that is not spent a the end of a budget year must be given back, and your next year's budget will likely be cut based on the fact that you didn't use your entire budget that year. This sounds like a good idea in theory, until you realize that managers see that as a risk to them being able to do what they need to do the next year, which means they will find ways to spend any unused budget at the end of the year (or worse, the quarter), even if it is for things that could easily be deferred until a later year, or for things that they don't strictly require. And this is how budgets bloat.

To be fair, the same thing happens in businesses, academia, etc.; it is not specific to government. But it is very, very common in government. And while those expenses might not look like a lot at an individual team level, they add up to a lot by the time you look at the organization as a whole.

But no, the hilarious thing is that you're telling me I'm wrong without actually rebutting a single point that I've made, which means you're likely arguing based on blind faith in an ideology or political group, rather than based on an actual understanding of how government budgeting works, which makes your opinion largely irrelevant in practice.

Just saying.

Real property tax. This is about other types of property, and Prop 13 would not necessarily apply.

The hilarious part is where you actually think I'm on the right. The right thinks that government waste comes from abuse, which really translates "things we don't like". Then, they try to cut out all the things that they don't like, and make a mess of it, because those things exist for a reason, and the result is predictable.

I'm pretty squarely in the center ideologically. I am fiscally conservative, in that I believe governments should tax enough to pay their bills. Such a statement would piss off both the right and the left in the United States right now, because neither side wants to do that. They'd rather use bond measures as credit cards and run up a lot of debt for the next generation to pay.

But saying that there is very little abuse or fraud is not the same thing as saying that there is no waste. The government wastes colossal amounts of money because of not modernizing their tech. The government wastes colossal amounts of money by pinching pennies in ways that come back to bite them in the a**. And so on. And if you don't believe this, you've never worked in any government, public school, or public university.

Case in point, every paved road is likely to be a mistake. Concrete costs only marginally more, but lasts a lot longer and requires less maintenance on average. We have between 2 and 2.5 million miles of these "cost savings" in the United States. If governments had just spent just a bit more when they built the roads, by my very, very rough math, the U.S. would probably save about $10 billion dollars annually. That's $10 billion dollars of government waste that nobody is doing anything about, because fixing the problem costs money, and there's no actual money being allocated for reducing government waste.

The government also wastes colossal amounts of money on social programs that don't work. Once a program exists, it's impossible to kill it, even if it isn't actually achieving the desired goals. Instead, they pour good money after bad. Case in point, we dump huge amounts of taxpayer dollars into a public transit system that nobody uses, all to lower the fares so that poor people can take it. Yet when I put a pencil to it a couple of years ago, I calculated that it would actually be cheaper to give everyone living below the poverty line a monthly gift card with enough Uber credit for their average daily commute. And more of the working poor would be better able to hold down jobs by wasting far less time commuting, too. And some of those buses on some routes have so few people that single-occupancy cars would actually be more efficient, so it isn't even necessarily bad from an environmental perspective, either. Mind you, this is just back-of-the-envelope math, and a more detailed study could come to different conclusions, but I don't see anyone even asking the questions. They just seem to assume that doing it the way it has always been done is the right way to do things, and don't even consider that the right answer might be to scrap it and start over from scratch.

This is not to say that the ideas I'm suggesting here are necessarily 100% correct, nor that there aren't even better approaches. This is also not to say that government is inherently less efficient than business. All things being equal, it should be more efficient on average, because it isn't trying to make a profit. But there's a lot of waste in most businesses, too, so that's not really an argument that government isn't wasteful, just that we shouldn't automatically assume that it is more wasteful than for-profit companies trying to do the same thing. :-)

Private partnerships are relatively easy to evaluate. They have assets and liabilities. Privately held stock in a non-public corporation is harder, but arguably, the value is zero until the company IPOs, at which point it suddenly is worth the market price on the date that you evaluate it. And art can be appraised.

Either way, perfect is the enemy of the good. You don't have to solve any of those problems. Just make the law cover only publicly held stock, cash, and real property (land, buildings, and improvements thereto). This will still cover 95% of the value, but with negligible effort.

Depends? Are you a sociopath or a decent person?

Decent people will realize that from those to whom much is given, much is expected. Decent people will realize that they didn't get there on their own; they got there with the support of the state where they live. They got there because of the police, the fire, the medical services, the education system, etc. And they owe a lot to the fact that they lived and ran their businesses in a safe place, where their employees were safe, where warlord weren't breaking in and stealing equipment, where they weren't being held for ransom by privateers, etc.

And those same decent people will realize that they can't realistically spend all that money anyway, and that they don't even have the ability to give it away benevolently at a rate fast enough to keep up with the investment income. So why not pay their fair share in taxes and give back to the state that supported them?

Sociopaths? Take, take, take, and give back nothing.

Nit: The limit is 10% of their tax revenue. It's a set percent, not a set amount. They're talking about raising that limit. I would argue that the limit should be eliminated entirely. If at some point in the future, California ends up with too much surplus for too many years, then Californians can pass another proposition to cap tax revenue or send out an annual surplus dividend check to every person living in the state for at least 9 of the last 12 months.

Prop 13 was one of the most poorly thought out laws in California's history, and its effects have been largely negative. Because of prop 13, taxes on property owned by business don't increase over time.

This artificially decreases rents and makes it more expensive to buy property, which decreases the incentive to build housing that is sold, rather than rented, which increases the cost of buying a house and makes more and more Californians dependent on perpetually paying rent for the rest of their lives.

This artificially decreases the portion of state revenue paid by businesses and increases the percentage paid by individuals.

This artificially decreases city and county tax revenue in cities that have a large commercial footprint or large amounts of rental property, again shifting the burden for schools, libraries, and other local services to individuals and away from the wealthy businesses that call those cities home.

This massively discourages people from selling their homes and moving closer to where they work which not only decreases supply and effectively drives up the cost of home sales, but also massively increases the amount of traffic on our highways.

Everything about Prop 13 was wrong. It was a stupid law passed by people who did not think through the consequences. Contrast with Tennessee's property tax freeze program, which allows anyone who is disabled or over 65 and meets certain income limits to freeze their property taxes at the current level. It still has the same intended effect — ensuring that people don't lose their homes when they retire — but without all of the negative side effects. With the level of income inequality in California, the age limit part might not be the right thing to do, but limiting it to your primary residence, excluding commercial and rental property, and possibly even an upper income threshold should be on the table.

Unwinding it safely will have to be done carefully, though. The potential exists for absolute carnage if the exemption gets removed for rent-controlled apartments, or worse, for rent-controlled mobile home parks. So there would still have to be a limited set of exemptions for certain qualifying business property for a period of time, then gradually shift to a less exempt rate. And maybe that would need to happen for all commercial property. Hard to say.

But either way, it needs to be completely rethought.

Blackout periods exist for all stocks owned by employees, thanks to insider trading rules. They're not limited to IPOs.

This is, of course, utterly irrelevant. When I get a property tax bill on my house (in California), I get the property tax assessment in June. The *bill* comes in October. The first half is ostensibly due in November, with penalties if it is not received by mid-December. The second half is due in February, with penalties if it is not paid by mid-April. So after the assessment, there's a six-month grace period for the first half of the money owned, and a ten-month grace period for the second half.

And government isn't going to be able to tax the value of IPO stock instantly anyway. They'll know what the value was on a particular date. So unless your stock IPOs exactly on that date and you have a 180-day blackout period (really freaking unlikely), that blackout period will be over before the first half of your payment is due.

And if that's not good enough, just write the law so that employee stocks and options do not get taxed until after the one-year anniversary of their vest date or after any post-vest/post-IPO blackout period, whichever is later. And you're done.

And what happens is that in the next budget cycle, they say, "Hey, there's all this money over here. We don't need to fund that anymore. And now there's a shortfall again.

Things like this have been tried. Repeatedly. They create a little temporary relief, and then things go back to the way they were.

Absent actual, careful reduction of wasteful spending, what is needed is a real increase in revenue on an ongoing basis.

Because they were idiots led by idiots?

There's a lot of waste in government. None of it is the sort of waste that you find with gestapo tactics. It's not fraud that's expensive. It's tiny bits of waste that add up. It's hiring people to hand-enter forms that should be processed electronically. It's maintaining phone lines for fax machines when nobody has a fax machine anymore other than lawyers and CPAs (and only because they have to do business with the government that wants a fax instead of an email). It's buying more boxes of paperclips than you actually need because nobody realized that your team doesn't use much paper anymore and someone keeps sending them at the same rate as in 1988.

Government waste is death by a million tiny cuts. And the way you fix it is by making it everyone's problem. You don't make everyone scared of you. That's how you guarantee that all the managers protect their little fiefdoms and do everything they can to thwart you. No, if you want to save money, you start by announcing a program where if you find ways to save money, you can get a bonus in your paycheck. You spend money to save money. You give people a one-time bonus in exchange for figuring out things that will save money continuously over the long term.

And fixing some of these things may involve spending *way* *more* money. For example, modernizing computer systems and increasing automation to reduce manual labor, reduce maintenance costs, etc. costs a lot of money. But over the long term, it saves way more money than it costs.

In all my days, I've never heard of anyone saving money by firing people or by demanding that people find ways to slash their budget under duress. It never works, and it usually costs way more money than it saves. As Google's founders' letter says, "...it is easy to be penny wise and pound foolish...". A wise person knows that you have to spend money to make or save money.

But knowing that requires a successful businessperson. Musk... is a successful engineer, maybe even a successful engineering manager. I'll even give him credit for successfully running companies that weren't on fire with a desperate need to be turned around.

But when it comes to finding ways to save money, he is a wrecking ball. Twitter will probably never recover from the damage he did while trying to cut costs... because he doesn't know what the f**k he's doing. And somebody should have told him that a long time ago, but nobody did, because he's Elon. It's the same reason why nobody in the administration tells President Trump that he's full of s**t; nobody dares challenge those with power over them.

That's why they didn't find anything. They went into it antagonistically. They were looking to slash and burn. They didn't care who they hurt or what messes they made as long as they saved money. And they didn't do any of the necessary work to get the troops on board with their decisions. That might work in an autocracy, but it doesn't work in business, and it doesn't work in any sane government, either. And because they didn't have the expertise to actually understand the systems they were messing with, they invariably made decisions that cost more money than they saved, and nobody told them that they were idiots, because they had already alienated or fired most of the people who actually understood what was going on, and the rest were too scared to call them on it.

They didn't need an Elon Musk. They needed a Sergey Brin. But they got an Elon Musk. And that is why they did not find anything — not because there is no waste, but because they were looking for big, flashy cuts that would make headlines, rather than individually saving each of the millions of postage stamps that individual IRS agents use each year to mail out audit letters. After all, government is great at wasting billions of dollars; they just do it 78 cents at a time.

California has "balanced" budgets. They still issue bonds for various projects and pay back the money with interest, which is really not meaningfully different than the national debt, which is financed in the same way.

Sadly, California Democrats and federal Republicans all have the same mentality when it comes to spending: put everything on the government credit card and make the next guy pay for it.

A true balanced budget would not allow issuance of bonds for any reason except to cover startup costs for projects that, when completed, are expected to pay back those startup costs. For example, issuing a bond for high-speed rail would be okay, but only if a portion of the ticket revenue for the first 20 years will be set aside to pay back the loans. And only under those circumstances should the government be allowed to temporarily pay the interest on those loans.

Taking on debt should be a rare thing. Saving money to have money for future large expenses should be the normal way of doing things. Plan ahead. Start taxing now for what you want to build in ten years.

This is for apps distributed outside the App Store. Apple's cost is limited to signing the developer's cert every couple of years and having their timestamping server provide attestation exactly once each time that a new version of the app gets released. I'm pretty sure I could literally handle that much network traffic and crypto processing for every iOS app developer company in all of Brazil Brazil on a single 2007 Mac Mini on my lowly 50/10 Comcast Business cable modem connection at my house and still have enough bandwidth and CPU cycles left over to probably handle most of the rest of the world.

Their cost is so close to zero that it isn't worth serious consideration.

Fine. Target the spending like this bill does.

In theory, yes. In practice, that is true only if the government is not having to spend more and more money to counterbalance wealth disparity, e.g with social programs to feed the poor, house the homeless, etc. And as long as it is much harder to solve that problem than to raise revenue, you can safely assume that governments will choose to raise revenue. :-)

IMO, the right thing to do here is to have an annual 0.5% property tax that covers non-cash financial implements, with an exception for the first ten million dollars or so, with the threshold automatically adjusted annually for inflation, tied to the CPI or some other standard inflationary metric. Require companies doing business with Californians to automatically report this to the FTB. Do not require individuals to do anything unless the value of their securities exceed that threshold. Send an assessment to anyone whose securities exceed that threshold.

There are five things about my proposal that make it superior:

• It applies more equally to a larger number of people who have far greater than average wealth, as well as corporations headquartered within the state.
• It is not a sudden huge tax burden that would be adequate to cause people to suddenly move out.
• It is an ongoing revenue stream, which means the impact on state revenue is more predictable.
• It won't cause people to wonder whether the government is going to decide to do it again at some arbitrary date in the future (less uncertainty).
• It will result in a small, but meaningful long-term reduction in the wealth gap between the wealthiest and poorest Californians on an ongoing basis.

Just saying. I'm not going to be upset if the bill passes, but I think there are much better ways to achieve the same goal in a fashion that will have a more meaningful, more long-term impact, rather than being a quick money grab that causes a short-term boost at the expense of potentially long-term losses.