Thursday, January 29, 2026
The Briefing with Albert Mohler
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
4.8 • 8.4K Ratings
🗓️ 29 January 2026
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Part I (00:14 – 13:12)
The Morality of Taxes: California’s Proposed Wealth Tax on Billionaires Raises Big Questions About the Morality and Pragmatic Limitations of Taxation
- What to Know About California’s Proposed Tax on Billionaires by The New York Times (Laurel Rosenhall)
- California will miss billionaires when they’re gone by The Washington Post (The Editorial Board)
Once Upon a Time in California’s Economy: The Proposed Wealth Tax is Big Trouble for Billionaires, and the Entire Economy of California is in Big Trouble If This Passes
Part III (20:41 – 24:05)
Breaking Up with California is Hard to Do: The State’s Tax Law Makes Leaving Almost as Difficult as Staying
- The Hardest Part About Being a Billionaire in California: Proving You Left by The Wall Street Journal (Laura J. Nelson and Juliet Chung)
Render Unto Caesar What is Caesar’s and to God What is God’s: What’s at Stake?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | It's Thursday, January 29, 2006. I'm Albert Mueller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. |
| 0:13.8 | Well, as we're thinking about matters economic, matters moral, worldview issues, you know, inevitably, you feel it coming. We've got to talk about |
| 0:22.3 | taxes. And taxes are a big issue right now, particularly in California. And the reason for that is that |
| 0:29.5 | an organization, indeed it is a labor union known as the Service Employees International Union, |
| 0:36.2 | and also identified with United Healthcare Workers West. |
| 0:40.4 | It, according to the press, largely represents employees at private hospitals and also cooks |
| 0:45.9 | and janitors. The New York Times says, quote, within California, the union is known for its |
| 0:50.5 | aggressive use of the ballot initiative process to pressure health care companies, |
| 0:54.3 | end quote. Okay, so the bottom line is this. California has a massive welfare state. It's a |
| 1:01.6 | massive welfare state that has an enormous tax base. California, taken a loan would rank as one of |
| 1:07.7 | the biggest economies in the world. But one of the issues of economic |
| 1:11.4 | reality is that every economy has limits. And the ability to get taxes out of an economy, out of |
| 1:20.3 | taxpayers in particular, that also has limits. And this particular labor union has been testing |
| 1:26.3 | those limits before. They've come up with three |
| 1:28.5 | previous initiatives that have failed, but they're going in big time on this one, and it's getting |
| 1:33.5 | a lot of attention. Here's the deal. They say they want to propose a massive tax on billionaires. |
| 1:41.9 | And they say there are approximately 200 billionaires in California who would be |
| 1:45.4 | covered, and it is not only an income tax, it is a wealth tax. And this labor union says that if |
| 1:52.2 | the state of California does this just one time, it will basically bail out an awful lot of |
| 1:58.3 | the health care systems and help to fund health care in the state of |
| 2:01.8 | California. So who would be against that? Well, hold on. For one thing, the liberal democratic |
| 2:06.4 | governor of California is against that because he has at least some touch with reality. |
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