Kevin Conroy

@PNWConservative @MayorofSeattle Bag of rocks is smarter… Seattle got what it voted for… she will be your governor in 10 years

What I really love about @MayorofSeattle is that she cares about the poor. She will make sure grocery stores stay open by simply “not allowing” them to close. I’m liking this ruling with an iron fist style. Kind of reminds me of the utopia that was once the USSR.

Seattle is so progressive; it has turned regressive. Seattle is so liberal; it has turned illiberal—diversity viewpoint is scorned. Law and medicine have been ideologically captured. And there are snitch lines for those who don't bow at the altar of woke—compliments of former @AGOWA and current @GovBobFerguson. Seattle is so smart it elected @MayorofSeattle Katie Wilson who posts about her new haircut while demonizing @ICEgov. seattlered.com/seattle-red/ja…

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

@GovBobFerguson @future42org Guarantee none of those things happens - more waste fraud and abuse. Growing taxes and spending 3-4x state growth

The Millionaires’ Tax passed by the House represents historic progress in rebalancing our unfair system. It sends significant dollars back to Washington families and small businesses. It expands the Working Families Tax Credit to 460,000 additional households – that’s money straight back into the pockets of working families. It saves working parents money and ensures our kids are prepared to learn by funding free breakfast and lunch for all Washington K-12 students, which has been a priority of mine since I ran for governor. The Millionaires’ Tax will apply to less than one half of one percent of Washingtonians, but make life more affordable for millions. I look forward to signing it.

Back in Seattle this week… home to people driving in their car with masks on! WTF

@NFL_DovKleiman Super Bowl champs? Buehler?

The price of a hot dog at every NFL stadium:

@m_franceschetti @zebulgar @eightsleep @tether It’s an amazing product!

Today we're announcing a new round of funding that values @eightsleep at $1.5 billion, led by @tether Investments. Ten years ago I started Eight Sleep with one conviction: the night is the most underutilized lever in human health. Almost nobody was engineering their sleep. Last year, we hit free cash flow positivity, launched 3 new products, expanded to 34 countries, and published peer-reviewed studies showing the Pod reduces menopausal hot flashes by 56% and restores the body's natural circadian temperature rhythm during sleep, lowering core body temperature and improving cardiovascular recovery. A product you sleep on is producing clinical outcomes that rival pharmaceutical interventions. We're now building a predictive AI agent trained on 1B+ hours of sleep data. It anticipates your night before it happens. And we're advancing FDA filings for sleep apnea detection. Passive. Every night. No wires, no clinic visits. The night is just the beginning.

@EndWokeness AOC needs to finish middle school - my lord at least ask grok or any of the Ai tools where did the American cowboy come from - total idiot!

AOC slams Rubio's pro-West speech & calls for "class based internationalism" instead

@pmddomingos @christopherrufo 100%, it’s the best social experiment in our life time - maybe 10miles away… socialist left, unchecked homeless, runaway taxes, no law enforcement. Quick ride over the lake is beautiful Bellevue, exact opposite of Seattle - same state, same weather… it’s what Seattle was!

Bellevue, WA is the new tech hub of the world. Companies with labs here now include OpenAI, xAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Salesforce, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, Baidu, and many others. (Sorry, Seattle - everyone is running away from you as fast as they can.)

Share this video. They can’t afford superbowl ad prices, but their message is priceless.

@Softykjr He's young, made a mistake, take the apology, move on - we have all made mistakes, try and keep it in perspective.

Here's my take: I've gone from anger to uneasiness. I don't know if allowing Demond back is the right thing. If you asked me yesterday, I would say no. And I still think I'd say no. This is unlike anything I think I've ever experienced as a Husky fan. I've never in 32 years in this business seen the fan base this split on an issue this big. To say I'm nervous and skeptical about how it will play out is an understatement. You?

Play from 56:51 open.spotify.com/episode/2gMjDG… Bessent is so good!

@colincowherd Best Grinch impersonation yet...Love colin, but stop being such and LA Fan Boy!

🤷🏼‍♂️

@TalkOfTheShed @colincowherd 100%

@colincowherd Colin has a startling resemblance to the Grinch in this video.

@dgp where is this on the app and how do you download... not helpful if its paid... :(

If progressives want to know why so many Americans don’t believe claims of the climate apocalypse, it’s because so much of climate science has been shown to be unbelievable. wsj.com/opinion/a-clim… via @WSJopinion “wrongly printed as a decimal, rather than a percentage point.”

Seattle office rents plunge faster than any U.S. city as vacancies hit record highs mynorthwest.com/local/seattle-… Seattle leads in all the negative categories - remember the tower cranes... good old days!

The Lesson of Minnesota’s Fraud by @KimStrassel wsj.com/opinion/the-le… via @WSJopinion 100% right... Reimagine government!

Exactly right. 🇺🇸🚀

@thehoffather Finally! Gonna miss Sara on the council… rockstar!

Seattle City Council ends program distributing crack pipes, tin foil to drug users "...it feels like it’s giving a loaded gun to somebody who’s suicidal.” thepostmillennial.com/seattle-city-c…