Randall Gilberd

A town hall from 1883, paid for by a France that still produced, burned tonight by a France that only distributes. Forms outlive their purpose for a long time. Then they burn.

This is how you lower prices, socialist @ZohranKMamdani

There's no freeze on property tax. There's no freeze on the wages paid to landscapers, plumbers, electricians, drywallers, flooring installers. There's no freeze on the cost of lumber, copper, baseboard, quarter rounds, flashing, siding, window treatments. There's no freeze on the wages paid to janitors or porters. There's no freeze on utilities -- on electric, gas, water, sewer (building-paid utilities in hallways, lobbies, maintenance corridors; most buildings pay water and sewer for tenants). There are currently 57,421 units sitting vacant in NYC because it's more cost-effective to leave them empty than it is to rent them out. If you're wondering: "How that could be possible? Wouldn't making anything be better than making nothing?" -- the answer is no, because of the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act. The HSTPA mandated a certain level of renovation for a vacant unit, but did not allow landlords to raise the rent enough to be able to recoup those costs. If a long-term tenant moves out after decades, the apartment often requires $50,000 to $100,000 in lead abatement, new wiring, plumbing, and structural renovations. Because the law heavily restricts how much of that cost can be passed to the next tenant. The HSPTA eliminated the "vacancy bonus" (which allowed automatic 20% rent increases when a tenant left) and heavily capped Individual Apartment Improvements (IAIs). This means landlords who want a renovation loan would be rejected by a bank, because the landlord would not be able to show that they could repay that loan. Landlords who pay out-of-pocket would end up losing money, underperforming even what they could get by putting their money in a U.S. Treasury or gov't bond. Therefore, it's more cost-effective to just leave the unit vacant. That's why we have 57,421 vacant units across New York right now. That number is about to get much worse.

As you go to work today and settle into the week, please study the form below. You will soon need to fill this out EVERY year and tell the government what you own and then allow them to tell you how much its worth. That is the framework that is enabled by the Trojan Horse "Billionaire Tax" that is trying to get passed. Give them credit: they cleverly use Billionaires as the hook, but build in the language and the framework that will allow the Legislature to simply extend the tax to everyone and make it yearly. And this is where the form below comes in... In this case, ask yourself, will it be you or the Billionaires that will be able to fill this out properly and avoid penalties. As much as Billionaires can be pushed to do more for society, we all know that they have the infrastructure to manage these kinds of disclosures...middle class Californians do not and they will be the ones that get penalized in the end.

Jeffrey Epstein says there would be “RUNS on the bank” if the public knew how the banking system works. “If you have one [dollar], you can lend out nine. That’s the way our system works.” “People on the street... would find it impossible to believe.”

My recent trip to Brussels for the @NATO Ministerial meeting left me with one overriding impression: the US has long failed to address the glaring inconsistency between its relations with NATO and the EU. These are almost all the same countries in both organizations. When these countries wear their NATO hats, they insist that Transatlantic cooperation is the cornerstone of our mutual security. But when these countries wear their EU hats, they pursue all sorts of agendas that are often utterly adverse to US interests and security—including censorship, economic suicide/climate fanaticism, open borders, disdain for national sovereignty/promotion of multilateral governance and taxation, support for Communist Cuba, etc etc. This inconsistency cannot continue. Either the great nations of Europe are our partners in protecting the Western civilization that we inherited from them or they are not. But we cannot pretend that we are partners while those nations allow the EU’s unelected, undemocratic, and unrepresentative bureaucracy in Brussels to pursue policies of civilizational suicide.