 Let's let's pivot to Joseph Robin at Biden the Vainglorious. He will on March 7th, which is two days after Super Tuesday. I got a lot of dates in my brain be delivering his state of the unit dress, which according to reporting by Politico, he's going to be using it to attack shrink flation and corporate greed, the latter of which got me thinking we don't talk enough family about government greed, do we? So let's get our galaxy brains on and go around the table and each of us come up with an example of the government being greedy. So I think there's the government being greedy, but I think what Joe Biden is, Joe Biden is not accusing the market of being greedy. He's accusing kind of individual companies or maybe even individual CEOs of being greedy. So I'm going to return the favor and say that the best example of government greed is public sector unions because it's just individual people looking out for themselves at the direct cost of the taxpayer and of like the fiscal health of the nation or of their relevant states. Not only do we have this incredible, horrific, broad based, unsustainable, you know, accumulated obligations to public sector unions. There's been a lot of resistance to reforming, even for future generations, how those are structured. The Reason Foundation, which publishes this podcast, has done some good work in some states chipping away at that. So there's like occasionally a situation where you can kind of move from defined benefit to defined contribution like the rest of Schmos. But for the most part, public sector unions are perfectly happy to know that the math is not matting, that the numbers will never add up and that the taxpayers will be bailing them out. And they're just going to proceed a pace, assuming that that's going to work out. They're delighted to screw future generations without a single pause. And they fund political activity with the direct, that direct goal in mind. So just massive, massive, massive contributions, mostly to democratic candidates to sustain this unsustainable way of life as long as possible. If that is not agreed, I don't know what is. Like that is just a very direct, I'm going to take money that should be used for something else, has been promised for something else, money that we don't have, and I'm just going to put it in my retirement account, and then I'm going to go buy a boat in Boca. Screw you guys. Do they have boats in Boca? I don't really know. Yeah, I think Marco Rubio had one. It was a whole, like it was like a month-long news story in 2015. They're going to park their boat next to Marco Rubio's boat, and you and I have paid for it. Do you think the public sector unions were mad when they saw the Barbie movie? And she didn't say, man, this is hard. Wow. Wow. I was going to say, it's going to be great when teachers unions in Alabama say, you know what, yeah, those IVF President embryos are taxpayers. So they've got to be birds. They've got to be birds, because we need that money. Otherwise, I can't buy the boat. The embryos are going to count as enrolled students in the district where they are frozen for the purpose of appropriating, like per capita student funding. Yeah. Let's not forget that our teachers union friends managed to make sure that the well in excess of $100 billion that was thrown by the federal government in the direction of K through 12 schools, which generally receive per year something like $40 billion from the entire Department of Education, maybe less, that almost all of that went to fund pensions and do hiring and almost none of it. This is for a COVID relief stuff. And almost none of it went to like get new air filtration systems or whatever it is, water fountains. And never forget, there is something for everyone to hate in public sector unions because we have the police unions and we have the teachers unions. So just like summing up your most hated union and plug it into my argument. When I wrote that piece back in 2020 or so, I was reliably informed to Catherine menu word that those are two totally different things. Oh, I see. Yeah. No good point. There's actually absolutely nothing that those two unions have in common except for everything that either the teachers unions were good and the police unions were bad or vice versa. But it couldn't be that both of them shared a lot of characteristics that were negative. My favorite is that is how forever on the left in the criminal justice reform people. They have centered the idea of private for profit prisons being a source of not all evil but lots of the evil in the system compared to the less ballyhoot for them prison guards unions. And who do you think actually spends more money on lobbying? Yes, look it up. All right. Nick. No, not Nick. Peter, I keep mixing you guys up. Why not? Come on. This is like how my mom can't tell me and my brother apart. Yeah, just call them all Sam. Sam, what's Sam Suderman? What's your example of government greed? Sam, I am. So not that long ago, Washington state passed an excise tax on capital gains. And something happened right before that excise tax went into effect that is kind of notable. Jeff Bezos decided to relocate from Washington state to Florida. And he also sold about about $15 billion in stocks right before the excise tax went into effect, which would have cost him about $70 million for every one billion worth of stocks that he sold according to at least one estimate. That's a lot of money. $70 million. And he did $70 million. He avoided $70 million in excise tax 15 times by selling early. And this is also taking place in a state that has contemplated a wealth tax just very similar to the wealth tax that we have seen proposed by Elizabeth Warren. And the wealth tax, I think it's related to the excise tax sort of works a little bit like a wealth tax, not exactly the same thing. But the wealth tax is a really great example of government greed because it's stupid. Because it's not even a good way to raise money. Like if you want to raise money, there's just efficient ways to do that via taxation. A value added tax of that is a pretty proven revenue razor. But what has happened when just about every European country that has tried a wealth tax is they've actually repealed it because it didn't really raise a lot of revenue. Instead, what it did is it had what I'm going to call a Bezos effect. The producers, the people who were making money and who were wealthy in those countries, they just found some way to relocate to a jurisdiction that didn't have a wealth tax. And so what they ended up doing was depressing economic activity without raising a bunch of money. And so it's a really stupid grab for other people's stuff from the government is what the wealth tax is. But it's also just totally ineffective at the thing that it is supposed to do, which is raise money for the government. And to be fair, there are at least some proponents of the wealth tax on the left, not mostly in the academic side of the world, who are kind of okay with that. They'll just say, well, we'd like to raise some money with this. But the real goal is to punish wealthy people. They don't quite use the word punish, but they use words that are very close to this. And their goals are very clear. It is just about punishing wealthy people for being wealthy. It has nothing to do with even raising tax revenue and, you know, having more money for the government to spend on dumb stuff. That was a clip from the latest episode of the Reason Roundtable. To watch another clip, click here. To watch the whole episode, click here and make sure to subscribe to the Reason Roundtable. You'll be glad you did.