California’s Billionaires Already Paid Their Fairshare | Elaine Culotti

The Daily Signal

Government, Daily News, News, Politics

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 January 2026

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Coming off the heels of an already highly partisan, controversial ballot initiative season, Golden State voters are again being presented a choice that will have ramifications for generations to come: The Billionaire Tax Act. During the upcoming general election this fall, California voters will choose whether to impose a one-time 5% tax on residents with net worths over $1 billion, with the goal of raising over $100 billion. California Representative Ro Khanna, a purported 2028 presidential hopeful whose district includes the corporate headquarters of Silicon Valley’s elites, like Apple and Intel, has already endorsed the wealth tax. Makes sense? No, not really. California’s roughly 200 billionaires, “pay 47% of the taxes that go into the general fund. And what we're doing here in California is we have decided that we need to make a hundred billion dollars, right? And the way to get to it is to create this tax on things that have not been sold yet. So the way to get to it is to do a one time 5% charge on the 200 earners in the state that pay the most in taxes already,” argues Daily Signal California Commentator Elaine Culotti. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm going to explain that really so people really understand.
0:03.0	Taxes are on transactions.
0:05.0	If you earn a dollar, you pay a tax on the dollar because you have a transaction between you and your employer.
0:11.0	If you sell a car and you have a profit, you have a transaction, you sell a house, you have a transaction,
0:15.0	a sale, you go to a store, you buy a ring.
0:18.0	That's a transaction, you pay the tax. Sales tax, property tax, income tax.
0:22.1	Those are transactional taxes. This tax is not. What they're simply doing is saying you have
0:26.8	$2 trillion in assets. We'd like to tax you 5% on $2 trillion. It doesn't matter if 90% of that is
0:32.7	equity that has not been flushed out and been created into cash.
0:45.9	Hey, hi.
0:49.1	It's Elaine Collotti for the Daily Signal,
0:52.9	and I have with me, Babyface Boomer.
0:56.9	Good to be with you, Elaine. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited.
1:02.4	We are in the Pacific Palisades tonight and we're getting ready for tomorrow, which is the one year anniversary of the Pacific Palisades fires. And Max is here to help because we have a lot of
1:09.0	people that we want to see and a lot of people that we want to
1:11.4	interview and there's so much going on here. And so Max, what's on your schedule for the first thing?
1:17.0	What's your schedule look like for tomorrow? Yeah. So we've got a 1030, you know, it's Spencer Pratt
1:24.4	and a bunch of people who are rallying out here in the Pacific Palisades. One of the
1:28.2	things that said on the flyer was if the media comes up to you, let them know whether you feel
1:33.4	comfortable or not. And I think that I'm one of a few people who's going to feel totally comfortable
1:37.8	with going over there, meeting some people, talking. And we've got quite a few catering events
1:43.0	even here at the beautiful mansion by the way
	...

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