Speaker 1: And Hi, how are you welcome to the Big Podcast?
It is Friday. I don't know my've lost track of days.
Speaker 2: It's Friday today.
Speaker 1: It's the second day of January, Year of Our Lord,
twenty twenty six. My name is Tom Sullivan. And actually
a fairly busy day for the first business day of
the new year. We've got the President talking about his health.
He was taking questions from reporters, you know how he
does kind of an open ended thing, and he brought
up his health, so others we'll explore that a little bit.
Questions about now we're in a new year, what's China
going to do about Taiwan? Venezuela is starting to push back,
and we'll see where that's going to go in twenty
twenty six. And there's a wealth tax proposal in California
that I want to dig into because that's something we
don't have. We have income taxes, but not wealth taxes
per se. But and then I've also got a call
into Jason Lewis, who used to well, he and I
belonged to a small club. After I did ten years
of filling in for Rush Limbaugh, I went to Fox
and I couldn't do it. Anymore. They called Jason and
asked him to do it. So he's in Minnesota, so
I do want to see if we can connect with
him on what's going on with the Minnesota fraud, which
is apparently not unique to just a Minnesota. But let's
start today with this business about Taiwan. What is China
going to do? General Robert Spaulding looks into this pretty carefully.
I thought his comments were interesting here he is.
Speaker 3: I think they have the capability, certainly to impose their
will on Taiwan, but you have to wonder why they
haven't done it, And I think there's a couple of reasons. One,
I think they're concerned about the backlashing implications to trade
considering how their economy is going, and so I do
think it does restrain them. You know.
Speaker 4: The other challenge, though, that we face is as.
Speaker 3: They become further decoupled from the Western economy, then they
may become more aggressive. So it's hard to say now
what will happen with this, even because of the rhetoric.
Speaker 1: So if China does attack, what are we going to do?
We've President Biden said that we would respond, but the
rules say that we will not respond. What does the
general think.
Speaker 3: I don't think we'll have really the resources or the
time to respond. I mean, it's just off their shore.
They have immense military capability. I think the response is
going to come in very much the same way that
the Russia Ukraine scenario has played out, and that is
it'll be sanctioned, It'll be a further cut off of trade.
I think the United States will work to get the
world behind cutting off China from economically from the West.
Speaker 1: The problem is is economically we are tied because of
the massive chip production that they do in Taiwan. And
what happens then because if they take over the island,
there goes our chip production.
Speaker 5: Well.
Speaker 3: I think that's why Biden administration and Trump administration has
continued to accelerate the movement of man manufacturing back to
the United States. I think one of the thing that's
been happening quietly behind the scenes is Steve Feinberg at
the Pentagon has been working hard to re establish an
industrial base here in the United States and in friendly countries.
And so I think that's what you're going to see
a continued a continuation of a rebuilding of our industrial
base here in the United States.
Speaker 1: Well, I know that's the plan, but it takes years
to build one of those highly sophisticated chip manufacturing facilities.
Speaker 5: No, it's not.
Speaker 3: But it's been going on for several years already. It's
just accelerating now, and I think it's accelerating a way.
Is that quite Frankly the business community is oblivious to.
I think if you were in the halls of the Pentagon,
you'd see this very concerted effort to establish firmly in
the United States the ability to produce the things that
we need.
Speaker 1: So it's really good to hear that the Pentagon has
got the pedal to the medal to try to figure
out how to help the private sector businesses shore up
reshore chip manufacturing here, even though it will take a
long time if something happens before we're fully ready. What
does the general see for our future?
Speaker 3: Well, I think if if we're going to have a
crisis in Taiwan, it's certainly some of the things that
we could see here in the United States's disruption to
our digital infrastructure, to our power grid. We've already seen
malware embedded throughout our country. I think we'd see further
isolation and cut off from things that are needed here.
It could be rarers, it could be other things that
are part of the supply chain here. A lot of
times difficulty that we have is identifying Chinese components because
they do get tranships through other countries and then added
into the supply chain, oftentimes unbeknownst to the act actual supplier.
Speaker 1: China apparently is doing a lot of that transhipping as
they call it, which is the fancy word for China
basically has factories in Vietnam or Indonesia or some other
place and they ship through them, and so it looks
like it's coming from Vietnam or from Indonesia rather than
from China. But that's what's going on there. And speaking
of international hot business, we start twenty twenty six. Venezuela
apparently has detained five US citizens. If I was a
US citizen in Venezuela, I would have been long gone.
But apparently so this is going to heat up to
some sort of hostage situation. And in Ukraine, Ukraine is
trying to convince others that Russia is planning a large
scale provocation to try to disrupt the peace talks whatever
they are that are going on. And then they're going
to blame Ukraine and they're going to try and use
material that well, they'll say, look at this is made
in the US, something that blew up in Russia. So
William Taylor, former Ambassador to Russia, is basically chiming in.
Speaker 6: This is what the Russians do. They have lied about,
as you just said, they've lied about these attacks, and
the CIA called them out. They lied earlier, Sarah, this
is the pattern they Putin said when he invaded Crimea
in twenty fourteen, he said those weren't Russian troops. Well,
a couple months later he admitted that they were Russian troops.
And then before he invaded big time, the enormous invasion
in twenty twenty two, Putin and love Roth the farm
mister said no, we're not going to invade Ukraine.
Speaker 2: Well we know what happened.
Speaker 6: So the point is they do lie about these things,
and the Ukrainans are right to be careful about another
false flag operation. This will demonstrate that the Russians are
not serious. We've known this that they're not serious, but
that's will further confirm they're not after peace. They are
after Ukraine. And they've said that. Putin has said that
over and over he wants to eliminate Ukraine, destroy Ukraine,
have Ukraine capitulate, surrender. That's what they're after. They're not
interested in the negotiations. They want to derail these negotiations.
And that's what's happening. So, and answer to your question,
what do we do with the United States? Do we
continue to work with Ukrainians and the Europeans to make
Ukraine defensibles of make Ukraine able to defend itself. And
we put pressure on Putin to come to the table,
stop the war, stop the killing.
Speaker 1: Well that's nice, but it's not going to happen. Putin
is he just stuck in his ways. He wants Ukraine
and he's gonna lie, cheat and steel until he gets
that things. That's his that's his goal. So we've got
problems with Venezuela, with the five American citizens being held.
We've got problems with Russia and the Ukraine peace talks.
I'm not a big fan of these diplomats, and there
they sit around and have a high tea, but they're talking.
They had a meeting over New Year's with others Ukraine
and people from Europe and the United States and they
were all working out. They were ninety percent of the
peace agreement they think has been ironed out, but they
did not ask Russia. Russia is going to say whatever
they come up with, No, we don't agree to that.
So it's as we start off the year, we're count
on the fact that Putin is gonna is going to
dig his heels in absolutely foreshore. Let's bring it home
from all this international news. So Zorn Mom, Donnie is
now the mayor of New York City, and I just
want to report to you the city is still here,
still here. It looks just the same. I was going
to go down and see if I could get on
a free bus. Then I found out that none of
the buses are aren't free yet. I don't know when
they're going to be free. But that's and I'll go
shopping over at the New York City grocery store and
see what they have over there. So all that's going
to come about. By the way, at the it's wearing
in ceremony, it was very cool because it was at
midnight at twelve oh one, and they swore him in.
And it's in a abandoned subway station underneath City Hall
and I'm thinking, what is the message of an abandoned
old subway station? And speaking of free buses, are they
going to make the subways free? I don't see how
any of this is going to work, but I'll report
to you as as things come along. The FBI made
a bust well yesterday, this is a guy exactly on
New Year's Eve. This is a guy, an eighteen year
old guy from Charlotte, North Carolina, that has been coordinating
with who he thought was Isis. It was an undercover
NYPD guy and also an undercover FBI guy, and that
he wanted to go around in the suburbs of Charlotte
with a hammer and a knife and knock on doors
and when you open the door, he would greet you
by hitting you over the head and then stabbing you
to death. He wanted to kill at least twenty people,
was his goal. He told to the people that he
thought were Isis. But this isn't the first time. He
also was contacted when he was fourteen. He's eighteen now.
When he was fourteen, he apparently wanted to also have
join ISIS in some way, and they hot up with
him and his grandfather put a halt to turn him
in and they said they would get him mental health help,
but apparently whatever he got did not work. But anyway,
he's committed. His loyalty to isis. He wanted to attack
also in a grocery store and a burger kin in
the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina. Here is Russ Ferguson,
the US attorney for that part of the country.
Speaker 7: Talked about where he was planning to do this attack,
which was at a grocery store and a fast food
restaurant in mint Hill, places that we go every day
and don't think that we may be harmed. He talked
about what means he would use to kill innocent people.
He said he was going to wear a kevlar vest
and attack people with knives and hammers. And of course
he talked about when he was going to carry out
this attack, which was New Year's Eve.
Speaker 1: So they moved in on New Year's Eve and arrested
this guy. James Barnacle is the FBI agent in charge
for Charlotte.
Speaker 8: What we found was a manifest them which the federal
complaint alleges contained detailed plans to execute a massacre on
New Year's Eve. The JTTF collected evidence showing he turned
his back on his country and his fellow citizens by
pledging allegiance to ISIS with the intent of becoming a martyr.
We allege Sturvant was willing to sacrifice himself by committing
a terrorist attack using knives and a hammer to support
the murder, torture, and extreme violence that ISIS represents.
Speaker 1: So ISIS is still trying to radicalize and in this
case successfully, But the kid was like, most of these
want to be terrorists. They're not necessarily the brightest bulb around,
so thank goodness they got him. Steve Moore, not the
economist guy, but Steve more former FBI agent, has worked
on these kinds of cases. This is his reaction.
Speaker 2: What what strikes me, excuse me, what strikes me is
that this is what ISIS really wants. You know, we
all think about terrorism in terms of, say the nine
to eleven plot, things like that complicated, multi country, multi fine,
multi state financed attacks. When what ISIS is pushing for
and what al Qaeda was pushing for is uh individual attacks,
lone wolf attacks because those are harder to stop and
terrify people because it happens in their own backyard. Usually
I would like to see what kind of help he
got number one, But actually it raises fewer questions than
it does. Makes me feel good about things. I mean,
the fact that the parents were willing to come forward,
the fact that he he wasn't able to purchase a gun.
And this also indicates, by the way, if it can't
purchase a gun, that doesn't mean they're not going to attack.
There's some things that went right here, and we're fortunate
for that.
Speaker 1: So the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, they're
still out there, they're still watching, there's still keeping track
of social media and other means to try to figure
out who is being radicalized in twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's intensely difficult because what happens is, you know,
we have free speech in America, that's the wonderful thing
about this country. And people can say things online and
lower people in line online into their little their little groups,
and then once you start direct messaging these people, you
can say things that are conspiratorial, that are violent, that
are planning crimes, and we're not going to They're not
going to be on our direct radar unless we are
directed to them. So that's the kind of thing that
you know that radicalization does. Sticking with the domestic news today,
we've got courts have ruled that the President doesn't have
the authority to send the National Guard into all these
various cities Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles. So he's with d
C is different because that's a federal state, but the
rest of them. So the President said, all right, we're
going to withdraw the National Guard and give the National
Guard back basically to the governors in those states. So
the question now becomes, what will he do about his
efforts to crack down on crime using federal muscle.
Speaker 5: Your characteration correct that wrestling with that that issue on
how do you keep the citizens of these major cities safe.
I think that Trump administration plan was to have the
National Guard go in there and supplement the police forces
that were on place, trying to free them up to
do more law enforcement, a little bit of a show
of force to kind of keep the bad guys at
bay and listen, Judges in these different venues have determined
the president can't do that. But what the President can do,
and what he's hinted at, is coming back stronger in
a different way. I think you've seen that quote, and
that would be the mean one thing. It would be mean.
Invoking the Insurrection Act is the way the president can
do that, and and that still remains on the table.
I think that a tool that is viable for the
president to put troops in these different cities, and if
the if the rate, crime rate, or if the circumstances warrant,
I think you'll see the administration should do exactly that.
Speaker 1: Well, that may be the next move. But there are
also limitations to the Insurrection Act, and you're going to
have to show that there was a real uprising against
against the country for that to happen. How do you
have defined all of that? Again, back back to the courts,
obviously it will go. So the president, Speaking of the President,
he was again doing one of those talking to the
media taking questions, and one of the reporters asked him
about his health and the fact that we never got
an answer about the MRI scan that he had at
Walter Read a month or two ago. And it turns
out where the President says, well, it wasn't an MRI,
it was a cat scan. It was a scan, and
the they're they're they're quite different but maybe to a
person that doesn't pay much attention. Uh, maybe as he
thought it was the same thing. Here's David Irvin talking
about the fact that people are now in the left
side of the media trying to compare and question Donald
Trump about his health versus the way that the Republicans
questioned Joe Biden's elth.
Speaker 5: That comparing President Trump's health to President Biden's health is ludicrous.
Donald Trump is incredibly healthy. I just want to read
from the Washington Post story because I think it's really
important this one line. Trump has been almost omnipresent in
his second term, fielding questions from journalists, sometimes several times
a day, delivering impromptu remarks, and regularly hosting dinners at
the White House. That's incredibly important because what Joe Biden
did was none of that. Joe Biden hid from the press.
He did not invite the media into the Oval Office.
I talked to the reporters in this Wall Street Journal
last night, this story last night. They said that during
their interview of the president, you know, he pushed back
very vigorously on his health. But they've been president in
the Oval Office with him when he's you know, juggling chainsaws.
When he's being air traffic controllers on the phone. He
is incredibly vigorous. I spent time with a guy. You
may not like his policies, you may not like a
lot of things about this president, but his health is
one thing that I think is gets made a whole
great deal about and there's no there there whatsoever.
Speaker 1: I totally agree. And to his point, he said, whether
you like President Trump or not, that you can't compare
these two guys health wise. Now, Donald Trump may keel over,
I hope not, but he's going one hundred miles an hour,
and poor old Joe was shuffling around trying to figure
out where he was. So let's talk to doctor Jonathan Reiner,
who has been a physician to some of the presidents.
He's a cardiologist here or he's in washing in DC.
And doctor Reiner reacted to some of the news about
the CAT scan versus the MRI scan and the fact
that the president, the president said talking to the media,
he said, yeah, he says, uh, I take aspert every day.
They want me to take one of those small ASP elements,
but he says, I take I take the full inchilada,
the whole pill, not just some small, little baby aspird
and so he's he said, I don't care what the
doctors say, I'm going to take more aspirt. So doctor
Reiner reacts to all of.
Speaker 9: This point, you know, like the Bruce, this is a
story that just doesn't seem to go away.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 9: Well, first of all, the president is very self conscious
of that bruise on his hand when he sits at
the desk in his oval office. You know, he typically
covers that hand with his left hand. So what doesn't
make sense to me is why somebody who is obviously
self conscious of the discoloration on his hand would take
a dose of aspirin, which would be more likely to
cause bruising. And we know with clarity that a higher
dose of aspirin causes more bleeding, which is why we
don't use that dose of aspirin. So why in the
face of something that obviously bothers him, would he insist
on taking a higher dose of aspirin.
Speaker 5: So it just makes makes no sense to me.
Speaker 9: The other piece of this, by the way, is that
we have no history of the president having heart disease
or or prior stroke, So why is he even taking
the aspir It's not recommended.
Speaker 2: So this has been studied.
Speaker 9: Aspirins a drug that's been around for more than a century,
and we know with clarity what dose of aspirin is
sort of in the sweet spot with the greatest efficacy,
most effective, with the least amount of risk, and that
dose is eighty in the United States, is eighty one milligram,
So a quarter of the dose that he's taking. So
if if I go in and I take care of
somebody who's having a heart attack and we fix their
carnary artery, the dose of aspirin that they go home
on this is someone who's had a heart attack, would
be eighty one milligrams a day. So it doesn't make
any sense to me why he would be taking three
hundred and twenty five milligrams unless there is a medical
history that you know, we don't know anything about. And again,
it makes zero sense in the in the setting of
increased bleeding.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we'll never know why he wants to take
more aspirin than his doctor's recommend. But what was this
business about? He called an MRI and then now he says, no,
it was a CT scan. What was that all about?
Speaker 9: No, I mean absolutely not, you know, We were originally
told that the president's assessment, where this testing was done
in October, was done as just sort of, you know,
a routine testing, But his routine exam was in April.
His routine yearly physical was this past April. So we
assumed that there must have been a reason why the
president was tested then. And now we're learning from doctor
Barbarabella the president's position that it was done to rule
out a definitively rule out a cardiovascular issue. The President
must have been having some symptoms. You know, this is
all being dripped out over the course of very weeks.
We should really have the president's physician just come out
answer some questions and put this issue to rest. What
doctor Barbabella said, by the way, is that there was
there was no evidence of any abnormality on the testing.
But the President has had a cardiac cete in the past.
We know this because doctor Ronnie Jackson in twenty eighteen
during the president's first administration, stated that the President had
this exact test and it showed some carnary calcifications, which
is an abnormality, suggesting perhaps some underlying coronary artery disease.
So maybe this is why doctor Barbarabella wanted to repeat
this test to see if there's been any change in
those assessments. But again, there's there are a lot of
questions here, particularly why is the president taking so much
aspern and also why is the president taking aspirin at all?
Speaker 1: Well, we don't have the answers to those questions, and
Donald Trump is not alone. A lot of people are
super sensitive about their health. And I mean, the guy
goes like the energizer bunny and he's seventy nine years old.
I think he But that doesn't mean you or me
or anybody. Donald Trump couldn't keel over the next minute.
So it's it's we don't know, but at least somebody
we know that the doctors are keeping a close watch
on him whether he follows their advice. As another whole show. Okay,
let's go out to California, where there is a proposal
for a wealth tax, and it's a tax for people
that have a wealth, not an income, but a wealth
of a one billion dollars or more. Yep, that's a
lot of money, and a lot of people in California
not well, not a lot. But there's the tech center
has made Silicon Valley has made billionaires out of people
that used to be minimum wage people. I mean, it's
classic stories of people, the early coders in their T
shirts and peach parties, and it clicked and hit in
the next thing you and oh they're billionaires. So Robert
Frank reports on the wealthy for CNBC. He was talking
about this this morning.
Speaker 10: We're going to go to a wealth proposal in California
that has angered some of the state's richest and some
in the startup community. One of the big questions around
the proposed billionaire tax is valuation. So most of the
two hundred billionaires in California made their wealth in tech,
usually a stake in a private or a public company.
Tech companies, as we all know and have seen, are
highly evolved. So let's say your steak in a tech
company was worth a billion dollars as of January first,
next year, you would owe fifty million dollar tax.
Speaker 4: If that valuation falls, let's say.
Speaker 10: By half in a few months, you would still owe
that fifty million dollar tax.
Speaker 4: In other words, tough. The bill makes no mention of
refunds or credits.
Speaker 10: Now, the issue is especially important giving the volatility of
tech stocks and valuation last year the AI boom created
fifty new billionaires, many of them in California. If AI
valuations could decline, some of those AI billionaires will no
longer be billionaires.
Speaker 4: But they'd still a well tax on wealth that they
no longer have.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 10: The bill does make provisions for private companies or illiquid
assets that allows them to pay over five years, but
the amount that is owed actually doesn't change, and there
are penalties of up to twenty to forty percent of
the amount owed for those who failed to pay. So
a lot of people I've talked to a lot of
tax attorneys that are helping a lot of Californians either
make plans or move out of California. The question will be,
because this is retroactive to yesterday, you have to approve
you're no longer tax resident as of January first, twenty
twenty six.
Speaker 4: Did they get enough time?
Speaker 10: Will Will it sort of withstand the legal challenges that
it will inevitably be faced. But there are a lot
of billionaires in California and soon to be billionaires that
are trying to lead, playing to leave, at least finding
out what it takes to lead California.
Speaker 11: There were a flurry of announcements that went out, Peter
TiAl making a point of saying that his new office
in Miami is set up. Larry Sachs said that he's
got a new office that just opened in Austin, Texas.
And I think Peter Tile's signed that December signed the
least their extension on that.
Speaker 4: What was Larry Page's Larry Page the same thing. He's
got a family office in Miami. As family office head
is now spending a lot of time Miami.
Speaker 10: Now, the question of residency isn't just did you leave
or were you out of the state for more than
one hundred and eighty days. It has to do with
your bank accounts, where your kids are in school, where
your pet goes to the vet, where your dentist is.
So unless you've shown a pattern of all those things
being in Texas or Florida for the past year, and
the California auditors are very tough, even tougher than New
York when it comes to forcing you to prove that
you have actually left. So that's going to be a
question along with can you actually make will the tax
itself survive legal claims, but can you make a tax retroactive?
Speaker 4: That's going to be another question.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there have been taxes that have been retroactive, very
very unpopular. Obviously surprise this lob went into effect a
year ago or six months ago. It has happened not often.
But the real problem with a wealth tax is exactly
what he explained. If you're a billionaire because your company
hit it big and you own most of the stock,
but then all of a sudden it doesn't continue its
popularity and it falls in value and you're no longer
a billionaire, what happens to the billionaire tax that you paid.
And that's the problem, especially with t where the stock
values can rapidly go up and can rapidly fall. And
I'm looking ahead at the AI buzz that everybody's talking about,
and there are a lot of AI companies that are
valued to the moon, and a lot of them are
not going to exist a year from now or maybe
five years. For sure, there's going to be a washout,
just like there was with the Internet. There will be
a lot of companies that are trying, but very few
of them will succeed. And if you're one of the
owners of one of those that doesn't succeed, what do
you do about getting the money back. There's no provision
for that. So two people, one of them is Patrick Toomey,
a former senator from Pennsylvania, and Heidi HIKEMP, a former
senator from South Dakota. She was a Democrat, still is.
Pat Toomey was a Republican still is. Here's how they
reacted to this business about the California Wealth Tech.
Speaker 4: Well.
Speaker 12: So as the bottom line is, I think this is
a remarkably bad idea from a state that is quite
generous in providing us with bad ideas. First and foremost
is the principle here. We are not anywhere in this
country to my knowledge, have we established the principle that
the government is going to confiscate part of your assets
to give them the way to people who to them
if they don't belong. This is something new and different.
We definitely take income. We take a disproportionately high share
of the income from upper income people, certainly relative to
their share of earnings, and that's because we have an
extremely progressive tax system, and it's one of the most
progressive in the entire OECD. But this would be a
whole new idea that we're going to just confiscate part
of your assets after in most cases people have paid
income taxes on whatever it is that allow them to
accumulate these savings. A couple of other points I would
make about this particular proposal. First of all, it's a
lot of false advertising when they suggest this is going
to be a one time hit. That's the way it's drafted.
But it also stipulates in the proposal that any revenue
from this new tax has to go to expanding healthcare,
and that means medicaid. As a practical matter, as we've seen,
including very recently with respect to Obamacare, anytime you expand
an entitlement, the left intends that that expansion is permanent.
And when the funding runs out and the spending continues,
they're coming back for more. And when the exodus of
billionaires it's not going to be just billionaires. People are
going to realize there's no limiting principle here. If you
can confiscate the assets of a billionaire, why not someone
who's worth five hundred million or one hundred million. And
so the exodus will be profound. And these are the
folks that pay the lion's share of the revenue to California.
Speaker 1: This is a.
Speaker 12: Disaster in the making if they proceed with us.
Speaker 1: I like the way he described rather politely, this idea
came from a state that has given us a lot
of bad ideas. He was talking about the fact that
the whole idea is to provide the money from the
billionaire tax for healthcare. This reminds me. I talked about
it a couple of weeks ago after Rob Reiner was killed.
Rob Reiner, Oh, it had to be thirty years ago.
He came up with a bad idea, and his idea
was he was all for helping with more early childhood education. Okay,
The idea was to put a tax on cigarettes, and
that money from the tax on smoking would pay for
early childhood education in California. And I said at the time,
what happens if fewer people smoke, What if smoking drops
in popularity, where's the money going to come from the programs?
You're not going to take the programs away. And that
is exactly what has happened in California. They still have
these moneies for early childhood education that were supposed to
be funded by tobacco. But tobacco smoking is a fraction
of what it used to be. And that's exactly what
this is going to be as well. So Toomey is
a Republican. Heidi high Camp is a Democrat former senator
from South Dakota. This is her feelings about this wealth tax.
Speaker 13: Well, I've long said you can't really be successful in
taxing I unrealized capital gains. I will disagree with Pat
on one thing. He says this is a new idea.
This is not a new idea. This is called a
personal property tax. And this personal property tax has been
tried and failed in many many states. It's been tried
in a lot of other places across the world, and
they've had to put the car in reverse and say
it didn't work. And so let's let's also recognize that
this is an initiative. They're going to need to get
a lot of signatures. The governor of California has already
suggested that he doesn't agree with this. I think some
of this is an overreaction. But of course, you know,
when you're looking at an effective date of this retroactively,
I think that that causes a lot of concern when
people look at it. But you know, the bottom line
is that this is intrusive. This is not consistent with
what we would call a taxable event. And Becky, as
you know, also on my resume is I used to
be a tax commissioner.
Speaker 4: I used to do this for a living.
Speaker 13: And these are very, very hard to administer. And I
think the left has gotten this idea that we don't
really need to dig into the tax code to find
those loopholes. What we really should do is just do
another whole new tax And I think there's a whole
lot of ways to address income inequality, a whole lot
of ways to address this in in you know, the perception,
if not reality, that rich people are not being jacked.
Then to simply embrace a wealth pass, I don't think
it will work. I don't think it's going to pass.
And I agree with Pat on one thing that people
when they go to the polls, they say a billionaire today,
it's me tomorrow.
Speaker 1: So good for Heidi high Camp. She's a moderate Democrat
and she doesn't think. She doesn't like this one. Iote, well,
since we're talking about money, market was open full session today.
The Dow Jones Industrials is the first day indicator of
the rest of the year. I hope so Dow up
three hundred and nineteen. The Dow forty eight thousand and
three eighty two, SMP up thirteen nas, DAK fell six points,
price of gold up a little less than a dollar
to four thousand and three forty two, and oil essentially
unchanged at fifty seven dollars now for a barrel of oil.
Thank you for coming by. Happy, happy, and prosperous new
year to you. I'm glad you could come by today
as well. We will be back on Monday. Have a
great weekend and we'll see you on Monday.