Left-wing podcaster Kara Swisher said on Thursday that billionaires who departed from California to avoid a proposed wealth tax were “ungrateful” and instead should figure out how to come up with the funds to pay it.
Several Democratic gubernatorial candidates, as well as Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, declared their opposition to a ballot measure backed by the state’s chapter of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) that would impose a one-time 5% tax on billionaires. Swisher told Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California during the episode of her podcast, “On with Kara Swisher,” how she responded to an opponent of the measure. (RELATED: Charles Payne Outlines What It Will Take To Get Venezuela Back On Its Feet After Socialism Wrecked Country)
“It specifically targets about a hundred people, I think it is, who are threatening to leave California, except for Jensen Hong, who’s apparently staying,” Swisher said. “I am of two minds of this. One is you made your, and I said it to one this weekend, I said, you made all your money in California, you ungrateful piece of shit, you could figure out a way to get pay more taxes and… we deserve the taxes from you given you made your wealth here.”
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Khanna, who told Swisher he backed a wealth tax, told her there could be constitutional hurdles to such a measure.
“I think that we should have it at a federal level. There’s a constitutional challenge at the federal level. You have in the constitution that you can’t have a disproportionate burden on a particular state in terms of revenue,” Khanna said. “The 16th amendment got around that for income tax. It’s unclear what the constitutionality will be on the wealth tax. I think it’s constitutional, but I support it at a federal level and it would be easier to administer at a federal level.”
“At a state level, I’d like the idea, like I said, the cleanest idea is to have loans taxed on the estate, and if we’re going to do it at a state level, doing it maybe 1% a year on public stock,” Khanna continued.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, then-Vice President Kamala Harris supported taxing unrealized capital gains for those worth $100 million or more at a rate of 25%, similar to a proposal made by the Biden White House in a March 2024 fact sheet, according to NBC News. Khanna criticized the proposal during a September 2024 appearance on CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” saying it would crush start-ups and force their sale to private equity firms.
“This is not the right way to do it and also, 95 percent of investments in startups fail, and so you’re going to disincentivize investments in those startups,” Khanna told CNBC host Joe Kernen.
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