And I did the math and noted, first, to get a dollar out of State of California, you have to pay them a million in taxes. In aggregate. Like if you pay a million dollars in taxes and it's equally distributed, maybe not a million to one quite but around there. Very close, ballpark, at least for the purposes of the following estimate:
I got a 1000000000x speedup (actually a bit more but I frequently round down to a more impressive number) on an algorithm thanks to those stimulants, and then it made sense: I still got 1000x ROI from paying taxes. Purely mathematical about it. Best money I ever spent! If you get a big enough speedup, taxes are a great investment. And they're the only thing that get people out of the absolute deepest holes.