The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 912 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Machado: Chavez Confiscated Over 5,000 Businesses Without Paying Owners
“And when Hugo Chavez came to power, he took over more than 5000 ongoing companies and enterprises and business, and he confiscated them without paying the owners.”
Machado: Russian agents and Iranian Quds forces train Venezuelan military
“And many of the, of their agents are freely operate in Venezuela, have trained Venezuela army and militias, as well as the Iranian could army.”
Lonsdale: Former SF DA Chesa Boudin Worked with Hugo Chavez
“Our recent DA in San Francisco, who we threw out of power chase a boot, and I guess worked with Chavez as did many other of the far left in the U S.”
Vought: Reconciliation bill's $1.5T mandatory cuts nearly double 1997 record
“There's a one in .5 trillion dollar in savings to mandatory reforms, which is some of the big structural drivers that we have. If you looked at the biggest mandatory reform in history, it would have been 1997 and eight hundred billion dollars adjusted For infl…”
Sofman: Waymo has driven 70M+ miles and is 5x safer than humans
“Today, like there's over seventy million miles and statistically it's five times safer than a human. It's like genuinely like it is saving lives from a, on a, from a statistical basis.”
Hilton: California government unions spend $1 billion annually on political contributions
“The government unions, by the way, it's a billion dollars a year. So one billion dollars a year. To politics. Just from the unions.”
Hilton: California Failed to Apply for Trump-Era Federal Mental Health Waiver
“The first Trump administration created a waiver from the IMD rule that states could apply for. Guess what? California hasn't applied for the rule.”
Hilton: Over 1 million approved California housing units are blocked by lawsuits
“You've got over a million housing units in California that have been approved by local government, gone through zoning, compliant with CEQA and all the other environmental rules, blocked by lawsuits.”
Hilton: 70% of CEQA Lawsuits Are Filed to Block Housing
“70% of lawsuits under CEQA are used to block housing.”
Hilton: Lawyers and government unions are California Democrats' primary funders
“Lawyers, along with government unions, are the main funders of Democrat politicians in California.”
Hilton: San Francisco Homeless Housing Costs Up to $1M Per Unit
“They defined shelter as what they call permanent supportive housing, which is an apartment unit costing because of all the other Corruption and regulation involved in house building in California, 700,000 dollars, 800,000 dollars, a million dollars now in San …”
Lonsdale: Harvard's Jewish population fell from 20% to under 5%
“One, it used to be for a long time based on merit, over 20% Jewish. It's very clear that along with this other kind of anti-Semitic stuff that was like not okay for the people running it, and they, and they've pushed that down to, I think, under five percent n…”
Thiel: China directly and indirectly accounts for half the US trade deficit
“I think the rough numbers are that about a quarter of the US trade deficit is bilaterally with China, but another quarter is indirectly with China. So China is, is sort of half the problem.”
Lonsdale: Xi Jinping will shut down TikTok rather than allow a sale
“I think because this is such a powerful tool for the CCP that Xi Jinping will not allow it to be Sold out of his control and we'll turn it off instead.”
Cotton: Federal improper payments and entitlement fraud total hundreds of billions
“And we're not talking something here, Joe, that's in the millions of dollars, that the billions or tens of billions. We're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars.”
Cotton: Supreme Court will restrict nationwide district court injunctions
“So I think these activist liberal judges are issuing so many of these injunctions that you will see a decision I hope sooner rather than later at the Supreme Court where the Supreme Court using its power the apex of our judicial system outlines the circumstanc…”
Cotton: China runs spies across Washington targeting U.S. government officials
“China has spies running all over Washington DC and elsewhere, targeting intelligence officers, military officers, high ranking government officials.”
Cotton: China pre-positions cyber tools in critical U.S. infrastructure
“They also are some of the most aggressive hackers in the world as well. Targeting government systems, targeting corporate systems, and placing tools in critical infrastructure for moments of tension in the future.”
Frerichs: Bud Light Backlash Erased $40 Billion in Market Cap
“The company lost millions of customers, billions of dollars of shareholder value, and forty billion dollars have been erased since this happened. Thousands of people have lost their jobs. They work with tons of independent distributors, family owned distributo…”
Frerichs: Big Three Asset Managers Lead 95% of S&P 500 Companies
“BlackRock, State Street, Vanguard have 20 trillion dollars of capital. They are the single largest shareholder, 95% of the S&P 500, and they have an outsized influence with the 20 to 30% of the shares they can vote.”
McCord: AI infrastructure spending will reach $1T by early 2030s
“I think, you know, it'll be the biggest infrastructure build that humanity has ever done, I think. I think you could make that argument. I think we will hit a trillion dollars in the early 20 thirties.”
Stitt: Oklahoma provides families up to $7,500 tax credits for school choice
“Now every single family has up to 7500 dollars of a refundable tax credit. To go to a school of their choice”
Lonsdale: US NGOs receive over $100B in government funding
“In this country, NGOs receive over a hundred billion dollars of funding from governments now. It's actually probably a lot higher than that.”
Gil: Curing all cancer and heart disease would only add 5-7 years
“If you got rid of all of cancer and all of heart disease, I think you add something like five to seven years”
Gil: Google's Med-PaLM 2 outperformed human physician experts
“Google released a model, I think two years ago called MedPalm too, where if you compare the answers from that model relative to physician experts, it outperformed them. In other words, if you use physicians to train the model will get worse.”
Gramm: Piketty's Inequality Data Excludes Transfers and Counts Asset Gains as Income
“All of his data is based on, when he's talking about inequality, he doesn't count any transfer payments as income, and he doesn't take into account taxes on the upper end, and he does the bait and switch on income on the upper end by saying, We should count th…”
Gramm: Two-thirds of US households match 1967 top quintile standard
“Compared to 1967, 66.3% of all American households are now in the top Quintile of earners as compared to 1967. Two-thirds of the people.”
Census Bureau Omits Two-Thirds of Transfer Payments From Household Income
“In measuring household income, the Census Bureau counts only about a third of all transfer payments as income to the recipients. It doesn't count food stamps. It doesn't count housing subsidies. It doesn't count Medicare. It doesn't count, and it doesn't take …”
Gramm: 88% of Government Benefits to the Poor Are Not Counted as Income
“So in total, for the people who are classified as being poor in America, 88% of the benefits that they get from the government are not counted as their income.”
Bottom Quintile Real Government Transfers Grew From $9.7k in 1967 to Nearly $50k in 2017
“In 1967, when the warm poverty ramped up counting all transfer payments as income received, and all taxes paid as income lost, the average family in the bottom 20% of income earners in America got 9700 dollars in real purchasing power dollars adjusted for infl…”
Gramm: US tax code is progressive up to $7.5 million
“But if you look at actual IRS data, the tax code is progressive up to about seven and a half million dollars a year.”
Gramm: Prime-age poor employment fell from 68% to 36%
“When the war on poverty started, 68% of the poor people in America worked. That number is now down to, and that's prime work-age persons, ok? Now it's down to 36%.”
Joe Lonsdale Claims Massive Racial Disparities in Top-Level Math Achievement
“So I think right now, for example, between the races, maybe it's not comfortable, but Asians have 25% of them that score, you know, at the top level in math, whereas with Hispanics, it's two percent and blacks is one percent.”
Phil Gramm: China Destroyed Half Its Tech Equity Value Attacking Jack Ma
“When government can't stand someone like Ma, and they attack him and destroy half the equity value of the tech industry in China, You're going to have an impact on growth.”
Greenblatt: ADL represents assaulted Jewish students at Pitt, Michigan, and OSU
“In the past month, since classes started, we tracked, I think we've got about half a dozen assaults, anti-Jewish assaults. We're representing students at Pitt, at Michigan, I think at Ohio State, who've been victimized and assaulted in just the past four to fi…”
Greenblatt: DNI reported Iran is funding and organizing campus protesters
“The Directorate of National Intelligence, the arm of the government that coordinates the FBI and the CIA and the NSA, they reported Iran is providing money And organizing capabilities to these protesters.”
Fryer: Houston charter-practice experiment closed the racial math achievement gap
“We took those five things and we put them in a randomized experiment in Houston in the worst 20 schools there.
And what we showed was that
In three years in the secondary schools, you could close, ah, the racial achievement gap in math, and in five to seven ye…”
Fryer: Pre-market skills account for most Black-white wage disparity
“And what they found out was that that 33% went down to seven percent.”
Fryer: Paying students for inputs like homework was wildly successful
“When we paid kids to, so we did two types of experiments. One, we paid them for inputs, right? So we paid them to do specific behaviors or accomplish very specific things that we wanted them to do. Do your homework. Come to school. Don't beat people up. Stuff …”
Fryer: Paying students for academic outputs produced zero results
“On the other hand, when we designed experiments exactly as economic theory thought we should, which is you pay for the actual output, not the input, we got nothing.”
Fryer: Black-White Median Wage Gap Is Unchanged Since 1950
“If you have the 90th percentile, there's been a lot of convergence between blacks and whites in the last 30 or 40 years, right? But if you're at the median, there's been no, the black white wage gap at the median is the same today as it was in 1950.”
Ross: Trump Taj Mahal's $800M Mortgage Bond Never Paid a Single Coupon
“Merrill Lynch and Bear Stearns underwrote an eight hundred million dollar mortgage bond for a company that was a startup. Trump had a couple million dollars in it, and that was about it. Well, it never paid one coupon. As you know, the coupons were every six m…”
Ross: University Survey Found Plurality of Youth Believed US Invented Slavery
“There's a university, I think it's University of Wisconsin, surveys people, 18 to 25 each year, with a bunch of macro questions. And the two most interesting ones on the last survey I saw, the first one was, where was slavery invented? You know what the most p…”
FBI assesses Chinese espionage now surpasses Cold War KGB levels
“The FBI believes that there is more Chinese espionage against this country, both cyber and traditional, than ever during the first Cold War with KGB trying to infiltrate our country, right?”
Lowery: US Border Experiences Thousands of Drug Drone Incursions Without Interdiction
“They have somewhere along the lines of a couple thousand drone incursions over the border, and all we're doing today is just watching them fly on by. That's all we're doing. We're not doing a thing to them, and they're coming in, and we know they're carrying i…”
Lowery: US Builds Only Dozens to One Hundred Air Missiles Monthly
“I think our entirety of our short range air missiles that we can build per month are in the dozens.
Like, I think in the tens or the, or maybe end up to like a hundred.
But just orders of magnitude less than what folks can build with consumer electronics.”