Heidi Scheuermann

@visegrad24 Enough

"But it is profoundly disturbing that a growing segment of the far left appears to be almost rooting for Hamas, Hezbollah, the Iranian regime, and other forces fundamentally opposed to the United States and our allies ..."

"Through the infamous Durban conference, History is giving us Jews a signal. And we had better learn to decode it." - Elie Wiesel ### Today, Mayor Mamdani celebrated St. Patrick's Day by spreading the vicious blood libel against the Jews, claiming that we had perpetrated a genocide in Gaza. He platformed and praised Mary Robinson, the previous President of Ireland, whose leadership of UNHCR was forever marked by the stain of the antisemitic Durban conference, from which the American delegation resigned in protest. Read here what my father wrote in September 2001, days before 9/11, expressing his profound disappointment in Mary Robinson and the hatred against Jews she had allowed to foment at Durban through the United Nations. Elisha Wiesel - March 17th, 2026 ### FROM ELIE WIESEL'S PRIVATE ARCHIVES: The Durban Conference will go down in History as an enterprise of shame. Instead of being an important international gathering of goodwill, it became a circus of slander. Conceived as a world gathering against hatred, it turned into a mean spirited meeting of hatred. I was supposed to be there. Both Kofi Annan and Mary Robinson tried their best to persuade me, especially since I was a member of the small "Committee of Eminent Persons", created by the UN High Commissioner, to help with the proceedings. But when I read the working documents I resigned. Antisemitism, which is the oldest group prejudice in History, didn't even figure in the program. What did figure was something about "holocausts such as the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Israelis". Mrs Robinson called me several times. I had lunch with the UN Secretary General, whom I had known for years. I explained to both why I simply cannot be part of an event that is so outrageously anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish. They claimed that the language would be changed. But the trouble was the content. I warned the UN Secretary General that the Conference, the way it was being prepared, will remain a moral disaster in the annals of social and political conduct among nations. For the content was sheer vicious hatred whose reverberations must revolt all decent and civilized people. Secretary Powell and his colleagues were outraged. Their courageous stand deserves support and praise. The American and Israeli delegations left; others did not. I wish European and South-American delegations had followed their example. Their explanation is that they will work from the inside to work out another draft resolution. It's too late. The damage was done. Hatred is like cancer. It goes from cell to cell, from limb to limb, from person to person, from group to group. We have seen it at work in Durban. Even respected personalities such as Kofi Annan somehow lost his way and said things that are unworthy of him. With the Durban scandal in the background, how can the world expect Israel to trust the United Nations? And how can good people, idealistic people have faith in its mission to bring nations together in an atmosphere of dignity? The Durban conference will be remembered as a forum dominated not by anti-Israelis but by antisemites. That militant Palestinians hate Jews that is known. It is enough to hear the various Islamic leaders harangues and read schoolbooks printed by the Palestinian Authority: they preach hatred and violence not against Zionists but against Jews. Their slogan, naked and brutal, which is everywhere the same, has been felt and heard in Durban too: "Kill the Jews!" What hurts is not that Palestinians and Arabs voiced their hatred but that so few delegates had the courage to dissociate themselves from them. It is as if in a weird and frightening moment of collective catharsis, they all dropped their masks and showed their true faces. Through the infamous Durban conference, History is giving us Jews a signal. And we had better learn to decode it. Elie Wiesel - September 4th, 2001

My post on Friday regarding the estate tax proposal in New York got 600,000+ views, so clearly this struck a nerve. Some individuals asked me to back up what I said so I am going to discuss what happens when states push tax policy past the breaking point. Here is what the data shows and it’s worse than most people realize. According to IRS migration data, New York has lost $111 billion in net adjusted gross income over the last decade from residents moving to other states. That’s not hypothetical, that’s $111 billion in taxable income that used to fund schools, subways, police, and infrastructure that is now funding those things in Florida and Texas rather than New York. California lost $102 billion over the same period. Florida gained $196 billion. Texas gained $54 billion. That’s not a coincidence, it’s a pattern. Between 2018 and 2024, 561 companies relocated their headquarters across the country. The San Francisco Bay Area lost 156 corporate headquarters. Los Angeles lost 106. New York City lost 27. Meanwhile Dallas alone gained 100, Austin gained 81, and Nashville gained 35. This didn’t come to a halt in 2025 or 2026. Palantir $PLTR which was the largest publicly traded company in Colorado, announced in February that it was moving its headquarters from Denver to Miami. It was PLTR’s second move in six years after leaving Silicon Valley in 2020. The governor of Colorado said he found out through a social media post. ExxonMobil’s $XOM board unanimously recommended that shareholders approve reincorporating the company from New Jersey to Texas after 144 years at the vote in May. Exxon has physically operated out of Texas since 1989, and its CEO said Texas has created a policy environment that allows them to maximize shareholder value. Chevron $CVX completed its move from California to Houston. In-N-Out Burger is opening a 100,000-square-foot eastern headquarters near Nashville and is leaving California. These aren’t outliers anymore as this is becoming the new normal. It’s not just corporate headquarters moving. Entire financial ecosystems are relocating. Citadel, one of the most profitable hedge funds in the world, moved its headquarters from Chicago to Miami in 2022 and has been building out aggressively ever since. They’re constructing a massive new waterfront headquarters in Miami’s Brickell financial district. Elliott Management moved to West Palm Beach. Carl Icahn moved Icahn Enterprises from New York to Sunny Isles Beach. Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment Management relocated to St. Petersburg. Goldman Sachs $GS is building a $500 million campus in Dallas designed to house over 5,000 employees. JPMorgan Chase $JPM and Wells Fargo $WFC have both invested hundreds of millions into massive new campuses in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Wells Fargo is also moving its wealth management division from San Francisco to West Palm Beach. NYSE Texas a reincorporation of the 143-year old Chicago Stock Exchange officially launched in Dallas in early 2025. The Texas Stock Exchange which is a brand new national securities exchange backed by over $160 million from BlackRock $BLK , Citadel Securities, and Charles Schwab $SCHW is set to begin trading by the end of this year. Nasdaq has also expanded its Texas presence with operations in Irving. When you have that level of financial infrastructure being built in a single metro area, that’s not a trend it’s an ecosystem being constructed from scratch to compete directly with New York. Each of these moves represents not just a company but thousands of high-paying jobs, billions in local economic activity, and a signal to every other firm still on the fence that states with competitive rather than restrictive policy are creating enticing operating environments. Currently over 1 million residents have left New York for other states since 2020 according to the latest Census estimates. International immigration has partially offset the population headcount, but it hasn’t replaced the tax base. The people leaving earn significantly more on average than the people arriving. Almost 1,700 millionaires changed their address out of New York in 2024 alone. Millionaires paid 44.6% of all personal income tax collected in the state last year. The proposed response to this fragility is to drop the estate tax threshold from $7.1 million to $750,000, raise the top rate to 50%, add a new 2% income tax surcharge on millionaires, increase corporate taxes, and add a capital gains surcharge. Under these proposals, the combined federal, state, and city top marginal rate on high earners in New York City would approach 54%. That’s a policy framework that ignores everything the last decade of data has told us. The Dallas mayor just publicly predicted an “avalanche” of NYC financial firms heading to Texas under these policies. Florida realtors are seeing a surge of inquiries from wealthy New Yorkers. Cities like Miami, Austin, and Nashville are building entire ecosystems including schools, cultural centers, and financial services clusters which are designed specifically to attract the people New York is pushing out. Ken Griffin and Stephen Ross just launched a $10 million campaign called “Ambitious Accelerated” to recruit more businesses to what they’re calling Florida’s “Tech Gold Coast.” They’re not waiting for New York to figure it out. They’re actively recruiting our talent, our capital, and our tax base. That’s what makes this moment so critical. We are in the middle of the most competitive environment for jobs, businesses, and investment that this country has ever seen. States are actively building infrastructure to attract employers and high earners. This is the time to compete, not to double down on the same policy approach that has been pushing wealth and businesses to lower-tax states for a decade. Texas entered its latest legislative session with a $24 billion surplus while having no personal or corporate income tax. Think about that for a moment, no personal or corporate income tax and they have a $24 billion surplus. Florida added more new businesses than any other state in 2024, with over 266,000 formed in a single year. These states didn’t create an attractive business landscape out of thin air. They made deliberate policy choices to create environments where businesses want to operate, where employers want to hire, and where working people can actually build something without the ground shifting underneath them every budget cycle. This matters because of what it means for everyday people. When a company relocates its headquarters, it doesn’t just move a sign, the entire company leaves, from the executive team to the support staff. It doesn’t stop there because that's only internal. Externally, all of the trades that may do work for the company will no longer receive those phone calls. The restaurants will no longer see those repeat customers. The tax revenue from those paychecks won’t be collected, and future job growth in the community from that company will cease to exist. When Dallas gained 100 corporate headquarters over six years, that meant tens of thousands of new jobs, new residents spending money, new homes being purchased, new small businesses opening to serve those people. That’s how local economies actually grow. That’s how neighborhoods stay alive, and when a corporate headquarters leaves a city, the exact opposite happens. The jobs thin out, the spending dries up, the small businesses that depended on that foot traffic start closing, and the tax base that funded public services shrinks. New York has every natural advantage in the world. The talent, infrastructure, culture, and institutions are all here, but it won’t be enough if the policy environment drives away the employers and investors who create opportunities for everyone else. The states that are growing right now aren’t growing by accident. They made a decision to be competitive. They kept tax burdens manageable, they created regulatory clarity for businesses, and they built an environment where employers want to expand and hire. New York has every tool to do the same thing. The question is whether the people making the decisions recognize that we’re in a competition and right now, we’re not acting like it. Here’s the part nobody in Albany wants to hear. The people who leave don’t just take their tax returns with them. They take their fundraising networks, philanthropy, job creation, and spending to a new economy. A city that once attracted the world’s most ambitious people risks becoming a place they leave once they’ve made it, or worse, a place they never lay down roots. That’s not ideology. It’s an economic reality that the IRS, Census, and corporate relocation data have been telling us. I said it in my first post, and I’ll say it again. When you tax people past the point where the math makes sense, they leave. When they leave, the burden falls on everyone who doesn’t have the resources to relocate. It’s time to take a common-sense approach to policy and make the great state of New York competitive again. New York has a decision to make. Either it continues down this path and alienates more taxpayers or it becomes more competitive. I love this state, but I am extremely worried for it’s future. We should be building a thriving ecosystem with an abundance of opportunities for New Yorkers, but instead we are pushing entrepreneurs and businesses to states that are more competitive with policy. Is this really the path we want to take not only for the current residents but for the next generation? @amitisinvesting @basispointpod @chamath @Jason @BillAckman @kevinolearytv @patrickbetdavid @PBDsPodcast

@altcap Thank YOU @altcap for your efforts to make this happen. It will be a Game Changer for our Nation - IMHO. 🇺🇸

@HeidiSVT Thx for spreading the word! 🇺🇸

Over 55K kids in VT are eligible for at least $250 seed accounts. Another almost 50K are eligible for seed accounts that parents or others can deposit funds into. I wish they had had these when I was growing up, and certainly hope parents are signing their kids up for them!🇺🇸

As a lifelong, taxpaying New Yorker, I am extremely worried about the ramifications of the estate tax proposal on New Yorkers if it gets signed into law. I want to be clear up front; this isn't about politics for me. I'm not fighting for the billionaire class, and I'm certainly not one of them. What I am is someone who understands basic math, economics, and business, who has watched what happens when states push tax policy past the breaking point. Here's what's on the table right now: a proposal to reduce New York’s estate tax exemption from $7.1 million down to $750,000, an 89% cut while increasing the top rate from 16% all the way to 50%. This is embedded within a batch of revenue ideas sent up to Albany to try and plug a $5.4 billion hole in the city budget. I want to discuss who this estate tax actually hits, because it’s certainly not the ultra-rich. The ultra-rich weren’t exempt as only the first $7.1 million avoided estate taxes. A $750,000 threshold in the New York metro area is not reasonable. The median home price in New York City hit roughly $809,000. In Nassau County you're looking at $820,000. Suffolk County sits around $675,000. Westchester is $754,000. If you bought a house in the city, Nassau, or Westchester and you spent 30 years paying off that mortgage like a responsible adult, congratulations, you're now above the estate tax threshold. What’s even better is that you hit the threshold before even factoring in your 401k, life insurance, savings, a family business, or other investments. This isn't a tax on the wealthy it’s a tax on a retired couple in Bayside who paid off their split-level. It's a tax on the family that runs a deli in Astoria and owns the building. When you force those families to come up with 50% of the value above $750,000 after someone dies, what do you think happens? They sell. They liquidate. The house goes, the business goes, and the generational wealth that took a lifetime to build disappears in a single tax event. Family businesses which are the backbone of employment in neighborhoods all over this city get gutted. According to the State Department of Taxation and Finance's own numbers New York's tax structure is incredibly top heavy as millionaires paid 44.6% of all personal income tax collected in 2024. The top 200,000 filers covered 51.9%. The bottom half of all earners paid 0.2%. Think about how fragile that makes us. You don't need a mass exodus. You need a few thousand people to change their mailing address to Palm Beach or Austin and the budget math falls apart. Here's the part that really gets me though. The biggest victims of "tax the rich" policies aren't the rich. The rich utilize their resources and leave once they have had enough because their resources make them mobile. The people who get crushed are the ones who stay such as teachers, firefighters, nurses, and the small business owner. They can’t simply pick up and go. The harsh reality is that when the wealthy leave and the tax base shrinks, the city still needs the same amount of money to run the subways, pay the cops and keep the lights on. So where does it come from? It comes from everyone left behind as they are forced to pay higher taxes, and higher fees. What may bother me more is the double taxation piece. The money in someone's estate didn't just appear from thin air. They earned it and paid income tax. They invested it and paid capital gains. They bought property with it and paid property taxes every single year. They bought things and paid sales tax. Every dollar in that estate has already been taxed multiple times over the course of a lifetime. Now when they die the state wants to take half of everything above $750,000? At what point does it stop being a tax and start being confiscation? That's a genuine question I have because if you work your whole life, play by every rule, pay every tax along the way, and the government still takes half when you die what exactly was the point of saving any of it? A $750,000 threshold doesn't catch billionaires it catches the middle class. It catches people who were never wealthy, they were just disciplined. They bought a house, they didn't sell it, they put money away for retirement, and they wanted to leave something for their kids. Punishing that with a 50% tax rate sends a very specific message: the state believes your assets belong to it first and your family second. I don't care where you fall politically that should bother you. I'll say this very simply. When you tax people to the point where they feel targeted, they leave. When they leave the burden falls on everyone who can't. When that burden gets heavy enough, more people figure out a way to go. That's not theory, that's exactly what IRS data and Census numbers have been showing us for half a decade straight. New York is standing at a fork in the road right now. One direction is more punitive taxation with an increasing dependence on a shrinking pool of high earners who increasingly have one foot out the door. The other direction is putting forward competitive tax policy, fiscal discipline, and creating an environment where building wealth and creating jobs isn't treated like something the government needs to punish. I know which path leads somewhere good. I just hope the people making the decisions figure it out before there's nobody left to tax. @amitisinvesting @BillAckman @chamath @patrickbetdavid @PBDsPodcast

Thank you VTANG! You make all of us Vermonters extremely proud!!

This is just the kind of thing we need these days. Love thee, Notre Dame …

“So are you for school choice or not?” - @CondoleezzaRice at the Reagan Library, 2024 🔥

Indeed … he is beneath contempt!

This is a terrible look for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. No other way to say it.

Excellent first week of session update bit.ly/3LOJbZS (@LCChamber) - focused almost exclusively on the continuing education spending/funding and property tax crisis. Every Vermonter should understand at least the truths laid out at the beginning. #vtpoli

RIP Scott Adams ...

Is anybody really surprised? Time to focus on nuts & bolts of economic opportunity, innovation, & affordability, & a high quality 21st century education system focused on students. Get rid of the bureaucratic deadweight - both personnel and programs - and do it FAST!! #vtpoli

The Iranian people are waging one of the most courageous anti-tyranny movements of our time against the Islamic Republic. The media’s silence is disgraceful. This regime will fall—and history will remember who stood for liberty and who looked away. x.com/Negaarsh/statu…

I came to America to escape people who talk like this. “Having a different relationship to property” is communist code for ownership being conditional and political. It is the same idea that destroyed entire societies, now rebranded with softer language and moral smugness. Property rights are not optional. They are the operating system of a free society. Every serious economist in history agrees on one point: incentives matter. Ayn Rand said it perfectly: “You can ignore reality, but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” Housing is expensive because activists and politicians make building illegal, slow, and politically toxic. Fixing supply is hard. Attacking ownership is easy. That is why failed thinkers always choose the latter. I have more respect for flat earthers than communists. Flat earthers are harmless, and everyone agrees they are idiots. Communism keeps getting recycled as virtue despite its body count and total record of failure. Communists, democratic socialists, or whatever they like to call themselves nowadays are society’s most dangerous idiots, especially when they are elected into positions of power. I lived under collective property. It meant decay, shortages, corruption, and people pretending to work while the system pretended to function. I did not come to America to hear these ideas again, dressed up as justice. I came here because this country understood something rare: freedom requires ownership. I have seen how this ends. It never ends well.

Lee Trevino with the perfect cap to golf in 2025 with this post-round interview for the ages.

You’re an embarrassment @SenSanders Always have been!!!

Wow