The Golden State’s Biggest Myth: Taxes Aren’t Revenue | Elaine Culotti

The Daily Signal

Government, Daily News, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 27 January 2026

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

California doesn’t “generate revenue”—it drains it. Taxes aren’t income, businesses create income, and Sacramento chased them out, argues Elaine Culotti, Daily Signal California commentator, on her podcast today: “The state itself does not create any revenue. The state builds nothing. The state earns nothing. The state is money out. It is capital outflow to pay for the state to survive. To pay for the infrastructure that it owes.” 👉For more videos like this, subscribe to The Daily Signal’s YouTube channel and enable notifications to be alerted the second a new video drops: https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1 00:00 Introduction and Overview 01:06 California's Revenue Problem Explained 04:16 Impact of Bureaucracy and Overregulation 06:56 Proposed Solutions and Government Actions 08:42 Conclusion and Final Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:29.7	I've been thinking a little bit about some of the narratives I keep hearing on podcasts
0:34.8	from people in the business industry and people that aren't in the business
0:38.4	industry but are politically motivated or feel like they need to talk about what's happening
0:42.9	financially in California. California has a massive revenue problem. People don't understand
0:48.1	is that you cannot view taxes as revenue, period. Taxes come from revenue. You have to have capital markets working.
0:59.6	You have to have small business, big business, employment, construction, infrastructure.
1:05.1	The state makes no money. It has no revenue stream, period. Its revenue stream is taxpayer dollars. It is the biggest
1:14.5	revenue problem in all of the United States because we have run all of the industry and
1:21.4	business out of the state. Hi, it's Elaine Kalladi for the Daily Signal.
1:40.6	I've been thinking a little bit about some of the narratives I keep hearing on podcasts from people in the
1:47.8	business industry and people that aren't in the business industry but are politically motivated
	...

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