Talking With California Gubernatorial Candidate Elaine Culotti

California's gubernatorial race is heating up and a lot of candidates are jumping in. We are reaching out to the top candidates and we'll bring them on to get to know their policies and to get to know them better. Our guest today is Elaine Kuladi. I'm a construction person. You know, I understand a schedule of values. And when I am the governor of California, believe me, a schedule of values will be the leading document. You have a plan and you have a seven-year plan and then you figure out how much money are you spending on your deposit and what is the percentage of completion. Are you getting the value on the actual time clock for the amount of money spent? Three prongs. And you have to have it with any business model or you will certainly run out of money. And I'm the first person to say what I don't know, I will ask and I will get. I don't have a big enough ego to be like, I know everything. I don't know half of it, but I have vision. I'm CMI Kurami. Welcome to California Insider. Elaine, it's great to have you and welcome. Hi, CIMAC, how you been? Good, good. You're deciding to run for a governatorial race and you're a candidate now. Can you tell us what's the reason? What are you seeing in the state that needs to get fixed under you? So before I decided to run for governor of California, I decided to spend a lot of time talking to mayors across California by creating basically a platform for mayors to talk just like this. It's called Mayors Matter. And I started up in Humboldt County and worked my way down to Chula Vista. So I've been all up and down the state. And I've met with like 49 out of 52. I have 52 on my schedule. I'm saving, of course, like Karen Bass and some of the big ones because I really wanna do those interviews with all of the information. And what I can tell you from that is not only am I the best candidate for governor, but I might be the only candidate that really gets what's gone wrong in California where we went off the rails and a simple path back, a simple path back. Because I'm not a political person, I'm a practical person, right? So I get kind of almost like frustrated with politics because I feel that there's politics in everything, even the food you eat or the religion you are or the things that come out of your mouth or how you wear your clothes or do your hair. There's politics in everything. People will tell me to dress differently or change clothes or not swear or put my hair up or put my hair down or cut my, you know what I mean? It's just a lot. Here's the thing. If you're spending all your money as a governor's candidate, a gubernatorial candidate on advertising and rallies and dinners and one-on-one talking to people and you're not door knocking because you're being hustled and shuffled around, you're burning through your campaign funds. I almost seven months, eight months ago, I went on Mike Rowe and we had a small conversation about this thing called the governor's grift that I kind of just made up. I couldn't believe the quotes that you get to run for governor. And now here we are and I want everybody in California to really listen to this because it's very important. I've spent 100% of my money on writing policy because policy is hard to write and I love doing it and I'm good at the beginning part, which is the idea, and I'm good at the mobilization part, which is how it would work. This is where I'm strong. But the middle, right, is the mechanics, the bill writing, the legislation, and then the implementation of the legislation. I can get the funding, I can come up with the idea and I can roll it out because I'm a mobilizer. And if we spend all of our time with these candidates, which everyone is guilty of it, everybody's guilty of it, talking and softballing them with, well, what are you going to do about homelessness? They're like, well, when I'm governor, there's not going to be any homelessness. What are you going to do about the fact that the $122 billion of billionaires' tax to the general fund is leaving? And they're like, when I'm the governor, there will be no billionaires' tax. I mean, you've got to not throw softballs. There are simple solutions to all of this that have historically worked and then gone off the rails. And running for governor takes so much time and mental acuity to kiss babies and go to these events and shake hands and do selfies and convince people with, you know, like, not kidding around here, okay? This is the new me. Hi, my name's Alink Kaladi and I'm running for governor. And if you scan this QR code, you can donate to my campaign. This is my line. This is for you. Okay, make sure that everybody you know, I don't care who they are, they have a sign in their yard, okay? This is running for governor. So what, so I can hand out 10,000 of these and I can raise $1 1,000 times is more effective than $1,000 from one person, because that's called engagement. It's engagement, getting people to be engaged in you and what you're doing. So I'm going to tell you five things that will blow you away about California. So my point is that Sacramento's responsible for a couple of things inherently by their legislative bodies, rules, and regulations. So the most important thing that Sacramento is in charge of is keeping the people that live in California safe and out of harm's way in clean neighborhoods with like, you know, where homelessness is under control and that businesses can open and things like that. It's like, there's a policing of a state. That's why all municipalities have fire police and EMT, right? It's all, and it's very expensive, but Sacramento is wholly responsible for the safety of Californians. It is very important that those things do not fall by the wayside. And that Sacramento does not put Californians in harm's way through lack of funding or through bad legislation or through sanctuary cities and things like that, what we call unfunded mandates, where you say to cities, you know, you need to do all of these things. We don't have the money to do it, but you better do it because your job in Sacramento is to find the funding to keep California safe. The second thing that Sacramento is supposed to do is create economic development and build business in the state so that there's enough money coming in in the state and people have jobs, that we are a healthy state financially. It's a crucial part of Sacramento's job. The Lieutenant Governor's job is almost exclusively for economic development, but you have all sorts of other things. You have, you know, bills that you write, you have funding that comes in federally, you have grant writing, you have the SBA, you have all these things that you can create businesses across California and you can bring business into the state, not help business leave the state. That's the second thing that's very important in Sacramento. And I think you're with me on this. We're failing at that in Sacramento, both on the economic development side and on the safety in California side. Those are our two biggest like slipper. We're slipped, we're gone. We've fallen through the cracks. The third most important tent pole of Sacramento is a relationship between the federal government and California. That's why Sacramento is always flying to DC and flying back and flying there. Just like the president of the United States flies foreign out and back domestically and foreign out and back domestically because his job is the same thing as a governor for the rest of the world. But the governor's job is to make a great relationship with the federal government, no matter who is in office. And in this regard, we have failed miserably. Okay, there's zero discussion between the Newsom administration and the Trump administration. And this zero, zero, I mean, net zero game is a race to the bottom. Because now, whether you like it or not, or you believe it or not, there's a push to bring trillions of dollars of industry into America. And Trump has been at a microphone. I have personally heard it. I'm bringing $18 trillion into America, right? And people were like, ah, not true. What if it is true? So what? Because California isn't in the discussion. We don't get any of it. We do not get any of the $18 trillion that may or may not come into America. So now, those are the three tentpoles, safety, economic development, and a relationship with the federal government. Those are the primary jobs of Sacramento. So since we haven't done any of those things, what we have done instead is we have tried to tax our way out of this. We've tried really hard. You had, is it Jennifer Hernandez on a couple years ago? And she was talking about the cost of all of the fees that they charge to build things, right? There's all these fees. Anything having to do with building department, CEQA, AQMD, these are all the big companies that cost us a lot of money. Coastal Commission, Caltrans, Bureau of Engineering, Department of Water and Power. I could go on and on, Department of Sanitation, Public Works. Okay, every single one of these outfits creates an obstacle to building, curates an obstacle to finishing something. An all in defense of your safety and the environmental controls that will keep California clean. Those are, that's what it's been. So for, at least since Trump showed up, EPA had been wholly focused, as you know, on the Green New Deal. This, I'm not saying anything new. Most people should know this. And Lee Zeldin said, no, we're not doing that anymore. We're gonna return EPA to the three tentpoles of EPA. That is air, land, and water. Okay, so now EPA is here working on, for example, the LA River and cleaning up the LA River, because they're wholly focused on air, land, and water, which is what EPA should be doing. And that's very beneficial to California, because now you've got a group of people federally that are federally helping us clean up this disaster that happened with the fires. So my point is, if you have a bunch of people running for governor that don't understand the basic three big issues, the responsibility of Sacramento. If I were to become the governor of Sacramento, or the governor of California, and live in Sacramento and be in Sacramento, I'd spend about five minutes in Sacramento. You're not in Sacramento. You're in D.C. trying to get funding for California any way you can, any way you can. You grovel, you kiss the ring, you beg, borrow, steal, because that federal funding is supposed to come back here. You mentioned these responsibilities that the California government has. Like, you see these three pillars. So how would you address what's going on right now in California? Would you focus in these areas? What would you do? I didn't decide to run until about 11 days ago, because of one thing and one thing only. I said out loud to many people on many platforms, I wouldn't run if somebody better than me was running. If somebody that I thought could really run the state was gonna run. And I was pretty sure that Rick Caruso was gonna run for governor, not mayor. It was a good opportunity window. The fires just pushed him over the edge. I was sure of it. And when he decided not to run, my heart sunk. It sunk, because I think that the bench for governors is so shallow, it's like a puddle. I've never seen anything like it. And not that I know a lot about politics, I don't, but I know how to run a business and a corporation, and I know how to hire and fire, and I can see problems, and I can write policy, and I can find my way out of a maze. We need new leadership that can do that. So I put my hat in the ring and said to myself, you're a long shot, do not run as a Democrat, and do not run as a Republican. Do not run in the middle as NPP. Everybody told me not to. Everybody said, you won't get any money. You won't be able to raise any money. Well, do I want to take money from the Trial Lawyers Association? No, I believe in tort reform. We have to have a bill for a bill in California, and we have to cut trial lawyers off at the pass when they lose a case. How often do you watch YouTube? And you're watching, and something scrolls up, and it says, I got $90,000 for my neck, whatever injury, and I wasn't injured in the accident, you know? And then we wonder why we can't afford insurance. So I cannot, as a Democrat, run because the trial lawyers loan to Democrats, which keeps all of this litigation. Would it surprise you that half of businesses in California are in litigation, and that if you open a business in California, you stand a 90% chance of litigation? Those are real numbers. So would it surprise you there's this thing called an unspoken tort tax, which costs households in California $3,000 a year, and in really expensive places like Beverly Hills and the Pacific Palisades, it's like $9,000 a year, because of lawyers. Lawsuits that are, in a sense, frivolous, right? That is correct. Look at, you had, I told you earlier, you had Jennifer Hernandez on a couple years ago talking about how the EPA and how CEQA and all these, and AQMD, which is the Air Quality Control, all these people can be accessible to homeowners that don't want buildings next to them, so they just sue, and they can bribe you. That's lawyers. Anytime you want to build anything or you want to get a pothole fixed, it's lawyers. Anytime you hire a lobbyist and you want to, you have to hire a lawyer. If you want to open up a campaign trust account, you have to hire a lawyer. If you want, it doesn't matter what it is. You want to buy a house, you got to have a lawyer. One way or another, you're going to need it, and that's fine, but when they start to dip into the business of contingency and class action, they should have to pay the fees if they lose. So on that, I will not get any money from trial lawyers, none, they will never fund me. In fact, they will try to block me from winning, because the first thing I would do would be tort reform, and that would spread across the world. Can you explain the 3,000, how does that, where does that number come from, the household? It's kind of an, it's called tort tax. I kind of discovered it when I was looking about tort reform. It's an unspoken raise in the cost of your insurance across the state. Because the lawyers are coming and suing the insurances and settling with the insurance, and then they raise, the insurance companies have to raise the price because of these lawsuits. Yeah, and obviously, I mean, if you don't believe me, look at, try to get insurance in the Pacific Palisades for fires. And by the way, there's like 10,000 lawsuits in the Palisades right now, and there's only 7,000, 8,000 structures that burned. So it's like everybody has a lawsuit. They come and they knock on the door, we can get you whatever, it's like, it's kind of enticing. But if they lose, they should pay the fees. It's crazy, you would think really hard about taking a case that was frivolous if you had to pay the fees as a firm. And you might say, I don't wanna get stuck paying the fees. I'm not gonna make this thing go to trial. I'm gonna settle this, settlements. Also, I don't wanna get stuck on that because it's one of many things. But we also have not upgraded California through economic development. We have this problem that we have with business in California, making it so difficult to work, which is a nice segue from that, is that we have 4 million small or big businesses in California, roughly, 4 million. And that number stayed pretty much the same. Sure, many, many restaurants closed during COVID, new restaurants opened, different businesses changed. There is a flux of businesses that open and close. But service industry businesses have really taken a pounding, and Main Street has taken a pounding. So Main Street would be like, where you go locally to go shopping and go to a restaurant and you pop in the local gift shop and you buy a gift and you bring it home and you get balloons. At the balloon store, you get T-shirts, whatever. A lot of that business has gone up online. Everybody knows that. So what percentage of things do you think that you buy online, roughly? A big percentage, yeah. But like, is it 50% or? Something like that. Something like that? Yeah, I'm gonna say I'm only around 70. So here in California, we have this thing called Bradley Burns Tax. And Bradley Burns Tax is an origin tax. Now, you're not gonna find other people running for governor talking about this, but it's very serious. Bradley Burns says, of the 10% tax that you pay on a sale, 1% comes back to the municipality where the sale commenced. It's origin. It's a sales tax, right? When you're paying about 10% sales tax, depending on where you are. When you pay sales tax at a store, all that sales tax goes to Sacramento, 100% of it. Sacramento collects 100% of sales. So I'm gonna give you the lawnmower. But then they give back some to that county. 1%. That's called Bradley Burns. Does it go to the city or the county? It depends, yeah. So it comes locally. So 1% of the 10. Right, Sacramento does not get the arbitrage of it. Just like, woo, let's just do, you know. And 1% of sales is a lot. I mean, in some small towns, it's $22 million, $30 million a year. It's important. So, say tomorrow, you know, you're gonna mow your lawn. I'm gonna give you a great example. And you're like, I'm gonna mow my lawn tomorrow, and your lawnmower doesn't work. It's an old gas one. You're pulling it, can't get it going. You go to Home Depot, you walk through Home Depot, and you see a lawnmower, and it's $179. What happens right away? You get a ping on your phone from Amazon Prime that says the same lawnmower is $159. They're gonna deliver it to you tomorrow morning. So now you're at Home Depot. Maybe you buy like an extension cord, and I don't know, you know, whatever. Batteries, whatever you need. And you leave. And in the morning, Amazon Prime shows up with your lawnmower, and you mow your lawn, and that's it. That's all you do. But what really happened in that case is that Home Depot lost the $179 sale, and you had an Amazon truck drive over your roads and deliver the lawnmower and all that garbage and boxing and everything else, and 100% of your tax went to Sacramento, and no Bradley Burns was returned to your town. So it's a big impact that we do not pay Bradley Burns on online sales. Instead, Sacramento keeps it. And a couple years back, like in, I don't know, maybe 2018 or 19, there was a real big lawsuit. It was Wayfair, Etsy, and a bunch about the fact that these big online aggregators were not paying sales tax, and a huge lawsuit was won, and they had to pay sales tax, so they now send the tax to Sacramento, 100% of it. So somebody brought up, like, well, what about, you know, Bradley Burns? What are you going to do about it? And Gavin- What about the cities and locals? Right, and Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill to return online sales tax to cities based on the fact that it was too much work for Amazon. Never mind that they're delivering to those cities and they already have the data. It's a simple, easy thing that returns the 1% to all the towns for the online sales. And worse, you can chat and grok all you want what percentage of sales are online. It will give you a consistent 28%. Why? Because it's not something people report on. And it's not 28%. And at some point, if somebody decides to really survey it, you're going to find that it's 75%, 80%, 90%. It has killed Main Street. And the data needs to be there, but the data will never be there because it doesn't serve the greater good of California for not returning the tax. And these are the kind of things that drive me insane. And if I was the governor of the state, not only would I make them pay the Bradley Burns tax, but I might even say you need to pay a road tax because delivery on the roads is tremendous, which brings me to the next thread, and that's infrastructure. Okay, infrastructure is why you pay property tax. So you would make the delivery companies pay a road tax. Of course. Like Amazons of the world that was living online. Yeah, they don't have businesses. And so they're using trucks and they've figured out ways to like use trucks that don't even belong to them, but still have their name painted on them. Their drivers aren't Amazon employees. They belong to other people that are contracted. It's just this whole like massive loophole, but you're always going to have to deliver. And you're always going to have trash and you're always going to have wear and tear on streets. And you're always going to be impacting Main Street. The more you do online, the more you impact Main Street. And Main Street matters to me. What matters to me as governor of California is every single mayor and city council person and the people that they represent, all 40 million, whether it's 17 and a half million that pay taxes or not, it's all 40 million people that live in this state need to have and be able to rely on the cities that they live in to help them make good decisions. And they can't do that if those cities are handicapped, not just financially, but also legislatively. They have handicapped our cities. One of the most important things that I want people to understand about the Pacific Palisades fires, if you take anything away from this conversation between you and me, the majority of what is wrong in the Palisades now has a lot to do with the way California as a whole has invested in California as a place to live. It's the easiest way to explain it. If you pay property taxes, whether you're a business, a hospital, a low-income housing unit, a single-family residential person, a person with a boat and a dock, and it doesn't matter what your, you pay personal property taxes. Those personal property taxes have a line item on the side of them, and I've said this many times. It is for schools, it is for fire and police, and it is for infrastructure in your neighborhood, roads and fixing roads, making sure that you have drainage, making sure that your community that you live in is drivable, you can get to your home, and that you're safe. It's Sacramento's responsibility that you're not busting a tire every time you drive home. The money needs to be spent on those things. The property tax money needs to be spent on those things, and Proposition 13, which Howard Jarvis and Shelley all defend, ensures that there's an X amount of money coming in all the time for those things. But California does as California does. It wants to raise and change taxes all the time to create more money, because obviously no money has been spent on infrastructure. So I say, if you take anything away from the Palisades, Malibu, and Altadena fires, take this away. The emperor has no clothes. Drive around and look at the roads and look at the drainage and the bridges and the traffic lights and the utility of these beautiful communities. And you will see that fire took away all of the soft stuff and all of the structures, but it did not burn the roads that are not there. It did not burn the drainage that is not there. It did not burn the slides that have never been repaired. It did not burn the bulkheads. It did not. It did not burn any of that. That was already gone from three decades of spending no money, including but not limited to fire hydrants and water and water supply, reservoirs, brush clearance, thistle brush. Every single thing has been left for us to fend on our own. And if we do it incorrectly or without a permit, we get fined. This has gone on for three decades. The only reason we got news is because it's Democrat blue check ground zero in the Pacific Palisades and the Democrats got really mad. And so what the hell? What's going on here? And created a voice for Californians to say, this isn't really being managed very well. A few people got really mad at people like Karen Bass or Gavin Newsom or Tracy Parks or Lindsey Horvath or I'm trying to think of all the names of the people that you always see that they're like terrible person, does terrible things, whatever. And the reality is Karen Bass, who here we go, everybody. Karen Bass is a hero. Tracy Parks, hero. Local community leaders like Rick Russo and Miriam Barr, they're heroes. They're people that threw down to try to figure out what to do. But because the dilapidation was so old and so bad, it's very hard to kind of untangle the spaghetti. You can't pull it apart and say, oh, that belongs to you, that's your fault and that belongs to you and that's your fault. No, you just group the whole thing together and you say, Karen Bass burned my town down. I've seen t-shirts printed by Spencer Pratt and Spencer is a friend of mine. He's a beautiful person and so is his wife, but he's heartbroken and his house is gone and his mom and dad's house is gone. It's all gone and it's gone at the hands of Sacramento. It's gone at the hands of stealing from our taxpayer base. You've stolen money allocated for infrastructure and for fire hydrants and brush clearance. You've stolen it, Sacramento. And this has gone on for too long and I'm sick of it. I'm absolutely sick of it. I'm tired of the fact that nobody wants to accept the fact that Sacramento did this. These cities have no money. I said it on day one after the fire. You know what I did? I went and saw Ron Tudor, who built the high-speed rail, who everybody wants to villainize him. They took all his money, too. Sacramento has their hand in every till and you know what they're like? They're like that crazy little monkey holding onto the peanut. The jar's empty. All around them are thousands of peanuts, but they just can't get their hand out of the jar no matter how hard they try. They're gonna get that last tax dollar out of you. They're gonna ruin it for you, but they're not gonna build anything back. They're not gonna build it back. And infrastructure is gonna be the demise of California. We're not gonna fall in the ocean because of an earthquake. We're gonna fall in the ocean because we never put our roads back. We don't rebuild our bridges. We don't put water where it's supposed to be. We don't fill up fire hydrants. We don't empower fire department to go out and help people. We don't let people self-advocate and do their own brush clearance. Everything requires a permit. Everything has red tape. And we don't give the cities of our beautiful state the money to implement these things. No, we tell them to do unfunded mandates. We say any extra money that you have, you're gonna need to spend on housing homeless people that we put in your town. It's criminal. It's nothing short of criminal. And no one will go to jail ever, mark my words, because it's a culture. It's a culture. Which brings me to my fourth tent pole. Politics are about ideologies. So the Democrats have an ideology and the Republicans have an ideology. Instead of policy and policy. If you ignore ideology, you wind up right where I am. And that's what happened. I just stopped listening to the ideology of it all. The hate Trump stuff and the trans kids in schools. Just to give you like polar opposite things. Ask any Democrat if they want trans kids, transing children without parental approval. Ask them, they'll all tell you no. It's a fraction of the Democratic Party. It's a small little fraction. I'm a reasonable policy person. I'm a non-political person. I'm a practical person. We have to live in a state that is wholly Democrat. Why? Because Democrats are nice people. That's why. Because Democrats want to give back to the community. Because ideally, in an ideal world, they believe that you should help the people that can't advocate for themselves. It's simple. They believe that big government can do that versus maybe the church doing it. We can't get back to that if we just hate everybody. And then what happens is, Democrats want to defend that position. So then they go to people like Eric Swalwell, who's running and running and polling high to defend it for them. Because he has this aura about him that's very similar to Trump. He swears a lot and he pounds the podium and he tries to be a big tough guy. How's he different than Trump? He's just spewing a different dialect. It's just a different dialect. But he's the same kind of person. There's no reasonable thinking. And then the way that the voting system is set up is that you have to get to a certain number of votes to get into this primary race. Hopefully two people then will, it'll be good candidates, right? Will then excel to the general election. So everybody's worried that two Republicans are gonna excel to the general election if you watch the news. Because Hilton and Chad Bianco are strong Republicans. And I say to you, it's almost physically impossible if you just do math. I mean, it's practically and metrically impossible because only 24 to 25% of Californians are registered Republicans. And someone like me comes into the race and I'm in the middle. I'm a threat because I'm a woman and Republican women identify with me more than they do with their own party. Because Republican women are the practical side of the Republican mentality. And then women in general like to talk to women, especially women that work and are moms and are practical and can balance a checkbook and care about them. That's 51% of the population. And that's 51% of the population pretty well divided between the middle ground, the Republicans and Democrats. And then there's men that are Democrats, but feel this kind of alliance to getting back to the true Democrat, the Kennedy Democrat, the middle row Democrat. And they don't like being lumped into the kind of the crazy politics of the left. There's a big market for someone like me in California because the Democrats are the oldest standing, largest group of people in California because they're Californians, that's why. And if you don't appeal to Democrats and you don't wanna make that argument, then you shouldn't be the governor of a state that has 60% of the state thinking a certain way. And what Democrats want are the same things that everybody should want. And that is safe streets, like getting rid of this homeless problem where a homeless person is in front of a business that you have to step over to go in and you're not allowed to move them. Democrats don't want that. They would like that you move them gently, but at the end of the day, they don't want it. They don't want transient children in schools without calling parents. They want parental controls just like any parent does. Democrats don't want parental controls taken down. Their party does. That's not them. That's not those individual people. Interview them. I have. I've interviewed every single mayor that I could talk to. I did not care if they were a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent. And every single one of them told me the same thing. We want safe streets and economic development. We wanna be, we want quiet enjoyment. We want the pursuit of happiness. We want the American dream. Do you know the mayor of Burbank, who is a Democrat, what a great girl, so nice and so hardworking. They had a ribbon cutting going on for the new studios that they were opening. I had interviewed her about, you know, Mayors Matter and where she is and stuff. And she said to me, you know, like, it's pretty ironic, you know, that you've got like these great studios and everybody's gonna have this amazing business. And then right behind there is this SB79 thing where they're putting high density housing in single family residential neighborhoods and nobody wants it. Deep blue Democrat. A deep blue Democrat said to me, nobody wants high density housing forced on them. So let's go from infrastructure to that because it's a very good segue. Infrastructure projects have been wholly dependent on lots of things, but not money well saved and plan well laid and execution and mobilization and delivery of a product. You have to have money set aside for infrastructure. And then you have to hire contractors and private public partnership to build the infrastructure with all the permits in place. You don't do that backwards. You don't go off half cocked and then wonder why you can't finish it and then spend all the money that you have with people that are fighting it instead of actually building it. Because that's not a budget that's sustainable and then it runs amok. I'm a construction person. You know, I understand a schedule of values. And when I am the governor of California, believe me, a schedule of values for California will be the leading document. You know, it's the most important document you can have. And it's simple, right? You have a schedule of time. I would have, what, seven years if I didn't get knocked out in my first four, which I would not because I would absolutely kill it as the greatest infrastructure governor of all time, okay? You have a plan and you have a seven year plan and then you figure out how much money are you spending on your deposits and what is the percentage of completion? And you follow that plan. That's a schedule of values. Are you getting the value on the actual time clock for the amount of money spent? Three prongs. And you have to have it with any business model or you will certainly run out of money. You're likely gonna run out of money anyway because of change orders and things like that. But without a schedule of values, you're dead in the water. So you mentioned that some tax dollars have left. Is that because of the billionaire tax or is it in general that people are leaving California? Well, you can cut to anything that I've said where we're the greatest economic development state for other states, right? That people just leave to go do business elsewhere. So what that's done mathematically is in a state of 40 million people where 17 and a half million people pay taxes, we would generate somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 billion a year into the general fund. Through Gavin Newsom's administration, we've lost 35 billion. We're around 265 every year, 265. Then they came up with this idea that we would do this billionaire's tax and almost immediately 88 billion exited. Now, how did that happen? Out of the 265 billion annually, 122 billion comes from like 200 guys. It's called the billionaire's class. They have 2 trillion in assets. So what happened is Trump cut off Medicare and Medi-Cal for illegal immigrants was just 35 billion a year. Scrambling here in California with the crazy ideas that we've promised all this money to go out that we don't have, they did exactly what they always do and they tapped the billionaire's tax idea. And billionaires just said, forget it, we're out. We're leaving. And I knew about this well before October of last year because I'd had some conversations, believe it or not, with billionaires. I'd say like, what are you thinking about? It probably won't pass, probably won't pass. It doesn't matter. The minute you start to go after unrealized gains, what that means is like, do you own a home? Yeah. Okay, so you have equity in your home, right? Well, if you never sell your house in this world, they would come and say, you know, see Mac, your house is worth 2 million and you only paid 1 million, so we're gonna charge you 5% on the million of equity, whether you have it or not. So when you get guys that say, taxing unrealized capital gains are okay, the trickle down effect is that means they're coming after your personal property and your equity. It's just a different way to do it. And my answer to that is no. So what I came up with instead, which is not novel, this has been done before, is to create the Great American Californian or whatever you wanna call it, I'd say the Great California or the Great American Credit Union, where the billionaires that live here fund jobs. So if we had taken $122 billion a year of tax money and funneled it into maybe $500,000 per business and created 250,000, 244,000 businesses, that would have generated 15 years of employment for at least 2 million people, right? And in perpetuity, that would have been a payday on businesses and taxes. But we spent the $122 billion paying for homeless programs and all these programs that we have that we can't afford. And we didn't generate economic development. But if you have a private-public partnership with billionaires where they can invest and you can do partnership with SBA for Californians to have small business and you can loan money for small business at really good interest rates and rebuild the California small business base, you can turn that frown upside down so fast. It's like you could turn it around in a year because what you're doing is you're investing in Californians instead of taxing Californians. And anyway, the current business plan that we have in California, imagine if you went to the open market with the California business plan and you walked into Bank of America and you said, hey, I need to borrow a billion dollars. Here's my business plan. No bank is gonna loan you any money when one customer is paying 47% of your bills. And that's what's wrong here. Because majority of the income comes from a small fraction of people. Right, yes. And so they leave, we're done. And economically, that has to be rebuilt back. And it's totally doable, but not by the people that are running. They don't know how to do it. That's why I stepped in. I wanna do it. I know how to do it. I have total vision for it. And I'm the first person to say what I don't know, I will ask and I will get. I don't have a big enough ego to be like, I know everything. I don't know half of it, but I have vision. Elaine, so you are running as an independent candidate. You're an accomplished businesswoman and entrepreneur. When was the first moment that you thought you should do this? About six months ago, I did an interview with Mike Rowe and we were talking about the governorship. And I said publicly, if no one better than me at running a business and understanding a schedule of values and understanding California emerges, if nobody emerges, then I would consider it. And I started asking around about what do you have to do? What do you need in terms of like money to enter? What is like the typical campaign cost? What are the most important things? And the more I researched it, the more I figured out it's pretty haphazard. And it's kind of like a mud on the wall thing. And people should know that because anyone can run. And I think there's 39 people running. There's a lot, right? And that should concern people because now it's not like merit-based. It's really kind of based on who can raise the most money and who gets the most FaceTime and who is the most appealing to the camera, who can get engagement. So I knew that I have engagement. Why do I have engagement? Because I'm authentic. Like I'm not putting on airs. I have a really long lifespan of starting up businesses and being entrepreneurial and being very scrappy. Like I can function with no money and I can function with a lot of money. I don't care. Undercover billionaire was like a crazy, people are like, she's a billionaire. Last thing we need is a billionaire in office. Guys, wake up. I'm obviously not billionaire, okay? But I'm a high net worth earner. I work really hard. I mean, shoot, I work like 70 hours a week. I work in my sleep. So undercover billionaire was this kind of great American dream idea. Like can you raise a million dollars of business out of thin air with nothing? No resources, no name recognition, no money, just empowering people to empower you to get to an idea. And I can do that. And that is what California needs. We kind of need like a strip down. And so the first thing that came to mind when I decided to run was, I don't want to run in an ideology that I don't believe in. So that's when I stopped with the party thing. I realized that there's a reason 41% of people in California identify as kind of no party preference, independent in the middle. We the party, we the people, whatever they are. They're just not Democrats or Republicans. And I think it's because like me, they're disillusioned. I also think that a lot of people that are conservative don't want to vote for a Republican because they think it's a throwaway vote because so few people are registered Republicans. But a lot of people are conservative. There's, it's okay. Like the Republicans that are running are perfectly fine Republicans. I don't know if any of them can really handle the state, but I thought Rick Caruso could. I was sure of it. And then on January 7th was the anniversary of the fires. I went to the big rallies and that night he was throwing this kind of candle lighting thing. He had these three sabers. There was only like a hundred of us there, maybe 125 people there. And he came out in a dark suit, on a dark podium, on a dark night. And it was, he was right. It was a somber event, right? It's a one-year anniversary of the fires. And he did this beautiful thing. He lit these three lightsabers, one for Altadena, one for the Palisades, and one for Malibu, which I thought was really authentic and cool. But I was still really mad at him for voting yes on Prop 50. So I was kind of mad at, I've been kind of mad at him. As a California resident, turn my hat around, okay, I think he would be a good governor. I thought he'd be good because he knows how to build a business. He knows how to play both sides between the middle. You know, he's got conservative views on a lot of things. So I was sure that he was going to announce. And then he said at the podium, it's not a good night to announce. Meanwhile, Spencer Pratt had announced he was going to run for mayor earlier in the day. And it was so chaotic. And I went to bed thinking, okay, he'll probably do it in the coming days. And then he announced he wasn't going to run for anything. And I'd been thinking about it a lot. Why wouldn't he run for anything? Why would he put so much money? And why is he still like always saying, like, you know, he's still a politician. He had a rabbi and a priest that night. The rabbi said a joke and a prayer and the priest said a joke and a prayer. It's like anybody who's a rabbi and a priest. I mean, you know, it was interesting. The whole thing was interesting. He's an interesting guy. And he's genius. He really is. And he's such a likable guy, right? But he's not running. And now I'm like scrambling. I'm like, oh no. And so I threw my hat in the ring and I'm running as the independent. And I had a great party. Everybody came. Everybody says how amazing it is. Everybody's so excited for you. Everybody wants you to do it, except the Republicans and the Democrats. They don't want you to do it. Well, good luck to Elaine Kuladi, California gubernatorial candidate. It was great to have you back on California Insider. Let us know your thoughts on this interview and stay tuned for more discussions with key candidates in California's gubernatorial race. I'm Siamak Ghorami. This is California Insider. We'll see you next time.