The Daily Signal - California’s Billionaires Already Paid Their Fairshare | Elaine Culotti

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

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

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Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. I'm going to explain that really so people really understand. Taxes are on transactions. If you earn a dollar, you pay a tax on the dollar because you have a transaction between you and your employer. If you sell a car and you have a profit, you have a transaction, you sell a house, you have a transaction, a transaction, you have a transaction, that's a transaction, you pay the tax. Sales tax, property tax, income tax.

Those are transactional taxes. This tax is not. What they're simply doing is saying, you have $2 trillion in assets. we'd like to tax you 5% on $2 trillion. It doesn't matter if 90% of that is equity that has not been flushed out and been created into cash. Hey, hi.

It's Elaine Collotti for the Daily Signal and I have with me, Babyface Boomer. Good to be with you, Elaine. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited. We are in the Pacific Palisades tonight and we're getting ready for tomorrow which is the one year anniversary

of the Pacific Palisades. States fires. And Max is here to help because we have a lot of people that we want to see and a lot of people that we want to interview. And there's so much going on here. And so Max, what's on your schedule for the first thing? What's your schedule look like for tomorrow? Yeah. So we've got a 1030, you know, it's Spencer Pratt and a bunch of people who are rallying out here in the Pacific Palisades. One of the things it said on the flyer was if the media comes up to you, let them know whether you feel comfortable or not. And I think that I'm one of a few people who's going to feel totally comfortable with going over there, meeting some people, talking.

And we've got quite a few catering events even here at the beautiful mansion, by the way, in the Pacific Palisade. So I'm looking forward to that as well. So tomorrow there's a run that's getting put on by a group of kids that are very interested in fitness. It's called Never Surrender. And it starts at noon. at the Palisades Park, right? Yeah. And they've got 100 people so far, and they're carrying American flags

running through the entire Pacific Palisades. So they'll be really interesting to see. And you're probably going to see this podcast after this has all taken place. So we'll be able to cut in some of the things that we're talking about. Yeah, no, it'll definitely be great. And I'll be out there too running with the flag tomorrow.

So I'm really looking forward to that. I'm excited. And it's going to be a bunch of young people that I've probably never met, who are probably from the East Coast or from the Midwest or areas of the United States that I have yet to touch. What do you think about this whole idea of SB 7-9 being put down at PCH and Sunset, where the Wolfgang Puck and Frank Gehry development is going,

where they're going to actually now add a transit district so they can do this SB 7-9. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think that's a BS. And I think even if the transit centers have specific requirements or criteria that they have to meet, they can easily build some of these bigger transit centers so then they can build up. And I think that's the biggest scam. And I heard your interview this morning or this afternoon with the mayor. And she's the mayor of Burbank.

And she said something to the tune of when people buy R1, they want to live in R1. They want to be there forever knowing that it's going to be R1. But with SB 79, you're going to change R1 for the years to come. I'm going to work on a policy and a paper, which I'm saying. starting to love doing. It's very exciting news. And to try to figure out if violating somebody's residential one, which is one house per lot, which is a single family residential personal property, if violating the zoning is somehow slandering the title or violating your rights to own personal property without somebody being able to put an apartment building next door to you.

I understand that it can go up in value. But I think it's terrible that we think that that is the only marker for changing things. I mean, listen, it, I'm a capital developer. I want to see real estate go up in value. But to take away single family residential, to me, seems like you're taking away the American dream. Right. So there's a difference between authorizing someone to build an ADU that would be theirs,

that would be part of their property versus just installing affordable housing that's not part of their property that's sitting right next to their property or across the street from their property. One makes the property go up in value. the other devalues the property. And the latter is what makes people really angry. Exactly. Okay, so that's, I know where you are on SB 7-9.

Where are you on the 2026 billionaires tax? What do you know about that? Well, I'm utterly opposed because I think what people don't understand is how many jobs billionaires create and how good they are for venture capitalism and how necessary they are in our state for funding key essential services. I mean, yeah, even welfare, education,

you name it, even our state employees. How are they going to get paid if it's not for billionaires making up roughly half of California's budget? I mean, you put it in a perspective. It may even be 40, 45%, but if you're going to say that's not a significant chunk, you're insane. It's 47%. Yeah. It's the top, we call them, I gave them a name. They're called the 200. So my group of billionaires, I call them mine, they're called the 200 and the 200 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 $100 billion. 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. There can be. consider the top earners, the 200 billionaires in the state that pay most of the taxes. They apparently have combined $2 trillion in assets. Two trillion times 5% is $100 billion, and the goal is $100 billion. And typical Sacramento, they always come up with the number first, and then they untangle the spaghetti backwards to try to figure out how to get there. So their idea is, we'll tax them one time 5%. The problem is they have to put it on a schedule and they have to expose their $2 trillion

in assets. and it's retro. And they're not going to pass until November, but it applies to 2026. So all these guys have to skate and get out of the state really, really fast if they don't want to pay it. And that's what we're faced with. And I just think it's insane. So if it's retroactive, that means it's a lot more destructive from my view. Because they're pinning it back to 2026 like you just stated.

And so now they're going to go through these people's items, their belongings, their things. where's their privacy in that? And honestly, if you're going to tax people, here's my advice. Newsom's chief of staff was actually recently charged for using campaign funds, funneling them to a personal account and using them for personal expenses. Roughly $200,000. There was an indictment federally. The FBI was even on the case.

If you want more taxes, why don't you extract 100% of that money? Go get the 200,000s that are being fraudulently stolen from we the people or that are being stolen from campaign accounts instead of going after people who are industrious. I mean, it's also a tax on things that have not sold. So I'm going to explain that really, so people really understand. Taxes are on transactions.

So if you earn a dollar, you pay a tax on the dollar because you have a transaction between you and your employer. If you sell a car and you have a profit, you have a transaction. You sell a house, you have a transaction, a sale. You go to a store, you buy a ring. That's a transaction. You pay the tax.

Sales tax, property tax, income tax. Those are transactional taxes. This tax is not. No transaction needs to happen. What they're simply doing is saying, you have $2 trillion in assets. We'd like to tax you 5% on $2 trillion. It doesn't matter if 90% of that is equity that has not amortized,

has not been sold off, has not been flushed out and been created into cash. So it's based on that asset's value, which would have to be done through an appraisal, which means you've got to now go through someone's underwear drawer to figure out how much money they have. Most importantly is the trickle-down effect. So all the billionaires are going to leave. So then the following year, if this tax passes, guess what? They're going to drop it. It won't be, say, a billion dollars, maybe it'll be $150 million. Or maybe it'll be anybody who made more than $15 million. And before you know it, they're going to be in your backyard looking at the equity in your house that your parents left for you. And you're going to have to get your check poetic out.

And you're going to have to write a check for 5% of the value of your equity, even though you've never transacted that house. This is a trickle-down problem. All they need to do is crack the door. They just need to get this thing even remotely close to being looked at. It's got to be shut down immediately. We need an opt-out for these guys, a better idea. Absolutely. I'm 100% with you. And I think the better idea starts with not just adding more taxes. I think the better idea starts with cutting spending, cutting waste, cutting fraud. And I think there's so much of it in

the state of California. There was a report that came out about the $76 billion that recently got lost, some to high-speed rail, some to homelessness, and some to different programs where, you know, the people who they claimed were the beneficiaries were not the beneficiaries. So that's a deep thing. And you know, here's the thing. The governor actually, we had a tax initiative that was going to be on the ballot that would have allowed citizens to first vote on a new tax approved by the legislature. The governor got that shut down by going to the state Supreme Court. So we don't get the say in that. They can just do it by themselves. Or I guess in this case, they can, and brainwash people into adopting a new tax,

thinking that they're going after billionaires, and the billionaires are just going to take it and take the hit. Coming up in the next couple of months is an opportunity for California to elect all new government in Sacramento. It's super important, all of you, that you register to vote, and you vote and you show up to vote. Don't worry about the party line thing. Read the policy.

And if you're not sure who you're voting for, jump on your little iPhone and AI the name, put the name in, who is this person and ask how they voted if they're an incumbent. It's really important if they're an incumbent because a lot of incumbents run. They have this thing that they do in politics. It's called running up or running down. And essentially it's this weird group of people that are already in office trying to keep themselves in office. So they don't have to kind of go out and reapply for the job.

They just sort of shuffle around the chess pieces. And it's very important because if those people have voted against your wishes continually, they're going to continue to vote that way, no matter what they're saying at a podium. So it's very, very important. We get rid of all of the people that are voting to keep huge government, not do audits, very important, not do audits, raise taxes and not focus on the two important things in the state. Affordability, affordability, and affordability and affordability. The two important things in the state are we got to keep our crime, low crime, no crime, slow crime, and economic development. Economic development is going to bring affordability, number one.

and if you have crime and you have people at your front door on your business, you can't open your business. So you can't have economic development. You've got to get rid of the crime and open up the businesses and create business in California. You need economic development and no crime, slow crime. And then you have affordability. No, that's exactly right. That's exactly spot on. And the thing with this tax, you said it best, I think, and that is it's going to force people to liquidate.

And when you force people to liquidate and you force people to move, like I said, it's going to cost a bunch of jobs. So all these salaried employees, which I'm sure there are millions and millions and millions of them, all these companies that these billionaires own have a bureaucratic structure with tons of people who are going to be negatively impacted. They will be laid off. They will be fired. They will be told that there's no more work for them, quite simply. And, you know, AI is already putting a lot of people out of work. Well, guess what? This billionaire's tax only doubles down on what's going on with the AI. I think it also, oh, that's such a good, you just made such a great point, Max.

So Max is saying, like, it's not just that they're going to leave, they're going to take all the jobs and work with them. Right. But it's the idea that they've named it, the 2026 billionaires tax. So the whole thing with me, I don't know about you, but for me, bills should be named for the people that they affect. Like, yes. So when you name mansion tax, mansion tax, it turns out only like 4% of the sales or something was mansions.

It was all like strip malls, hospitals, low income housing. It didn't matter. Mansions were just a small part of it because that tax is transactional. And then someone today to me said, oh, well, you know, they'll probably get it done because there's, there are wealth taxes. Okay, wealth taxes are transactional. This is a non-transactional tax. In my opinion, unconstitutional. It's the reason America was formed.

You know taxation without representation. Exactly. If you're going to go dig through somebody's underwear drawer to figure out what their diamond jewelry is doing in there and how much it's worth and then tax them on it, that's an invasion of personal and private, personal and private property privacy. And the problem with that that I have is not that they're billionaires. It's opening the door to everyone. And do we want Sacramento, Gavin News, do you want Gavin Newsom in your underwear drawer? You should ask yourself this question because that's really what it's coming down to. And he's leaving the state.

So I can't imagine anything that he approves is good for the state because he's out of here. At the end of the day, he's gone. And the new governor coming in comes into this mess. I'm telling you right now, you don't know who you're saying yes to. You don't know what you're saying yes to. People wake up. Every time they name a bill about billionaires and mansions, they're just lying to you. They're telling you it's not about you when it's really all about you.

Yeah. There should be something called the Crack Down on Deceptive Titles Act. I think we should criminalize something like that, where they name the title a mansion tax, and 95% of what it's applicable to is not a mansion. There should be criminal penalties, I think, fines, jail, I don't know what. But really, like you said, it's taxation without representation. In my view, in my view, that's completely illegal. people are already frustrated with the fact that a lot of their investment accounts, even before

they amortize or they sell them, the capital gains that are on them are taxed, even especially as they get reinvested into new stock, new dividends, or when they get new dividends, all that. When it gets reinvested, they get taxed on it. So they're frustrated with that. Imagine how much more frustrated they're going to be, especially at the billionaire level when their assets are being targeted. It's 5%. 5%. 5%. It would cost them 5% to move.

If they're leaving, they're not leaving over the money. They're leaving over the invasion of personal and private property space. That's why they're leaving. It's not about the 5%. Everybody can afford the 5%. I've heard even some billionaires say it's not the money. It's getting into your underwear drawer. It's invading your personal and private property. We live in America. This is not American. It's anti-American. tax people based on having to go out and get an appraisal. It's got to be transactional. It's not transactional. It's not legal. They have to find a way to make this legal. And I think that we should

really all be very, very upset about it. We should be more upset about this than anything because it's the portal to getting into everybody's personal and private property. Yeah. Well, we have a clear legal doctrine in the United States where we're allowed to bring, you know, foreign leaders like the Venezuelan leader here for prosecution. And we're allowed to go after that. And we're allowed to go after them criminally. That's something that has been, I would call case law for such a long time now. But basically what they're going to do in California is they're going to treat you like a foreign leader. They're going to treat you like somebody who's behind the drug cartels. They're going to treat you like somebody who's inherently adversarial towards democratic or Republican values

and principles. When that's not what these people are. These people are innovative. These people are industrious, they're trying to build. Maybe they are even now in the process of creating new jobs. I mean, forget even just shipping the current jobs that they have. Imagine all the potential for new jobs that you're killing, this potential energy that could be converted into kinetic, but the new tax that's put on these billionaires essentially kills those efforts. It's definitely, it's not about making the climate business friendly. Right. It's about making people want to leave California. And if that is the case, California is doomed from this type of mentality. Our goal in California should be, bar none, economic development. We should be bringing business

into the state. It's the greatest state to live in. Everybody wants to be here. The opportunity to do business here is so easy as long as you make it doable. As long as you get rid of the red tape, you give good tax incentives, and you allow people to build workforce housing, and you allow less litigation over employees and you start to really clean up the business of the day that makes business impossible. Yeah. Well, and the thing is, we just raised our minimum wage to 1690 because that's a law that we have. You know, they do a specific adjustment on the minimum wage about every single year, sometimes every half year. And with that, companies are going to have to make a choice. Automate more or cut hours, you know, higher robots. I mean, that's a big thing that's

going on right now, particularly in the service industry. So compound, A billionaire tax, a heightened minimum wage. Instead of incentivizing people to build skills to prove themselves, we're just hiking up the minimum wage, which doesn't make things better for anybody. If you studied the economics of that, you know that it forces a lot of businesses, particularly people who run small businesses into extremely tough decisions. And I think in some instances, it forces them out of business because labor is such a high cost. for those people. The little guy, they're barely fighting to stay alive. They're barely fighting to stay alive. So we're crushing billionaires and we're crushing small businesses simultaneously. That's quite the way to destroy his state. And then imagine all these people they move to Texas

because when their ideas are crushed in California, they're going to take their ideas somewhere else. They're going to take it to the sunshine state of Florida. They're going to take it to Texas, God-fearing Texas. So it'll be one of those too. for sure. Oh my God, the Exodus. We want to bring people back. So let's change our government in Sacramento. So this is for, hopefully for the daily signal. We love the daily signal. They've given us a voice and they're letting people in California that have conservative views be shining stars for the rest of the United States. So you can hear everything we have to say and what's going on here and know that we really, really do want conservative views. There are conservative thinkers

in California. We do want to change our state. Don't forget about us over here just because you know, there's a lot of other things going on in the world. Amen. I'm with you. Max, where can people find you? Babyface boomer, every single platform that you can think of. And when you are baby face boomer, when you are baby face boomer, are you reachable? Can they find you?

Do you have a website? So the best place to reach me, I would say, is my Instagram DMs. The website is something that's a work in progress. I had an old website needs to be updated. Ah, good. Well, he's a wealth of information. I love doing podcasts with him because he studies everything. and he memorizes it and he knows things cold.

I would never argue with him. He fact checks everything. Amen. So thank you. I appreciate that, Elaine. Thank you so much, Max. It's so great podcast. It's so great to have you with me.

So much fun. Okay. Thank you.