Wealth & Money Quote by Craig Benson

The line is engineered to sound like a heist: California dispatching agents across the globe to retrieve cash and haul it home. Craig Benson, a Republican politician with a small-government brand, isn’t merely complaining about taxes; he’s building a villain with a travel budget. The specificity of “regional collection offices,” “around the world,” “staffed by California employees” creates a bureaucratic monster movie where the paperwork grows teeth. Whether or not the image is literally accurate is almost beside the point. It’s an argument by vividness, designed to make listeners feel hunted.

The intent is clear: frame California’s tax authority as extraterritorial overreach and, by implication, frame other states as victims. “Out of state California businesses” is a deliberately slippery phrase, collapsing complicated realities (corporate nexus, multi-state revenue, franchise taxes) into a simple moral story: you left, and they still want your money. That’s a potent politics-of-flight narrative in an era when red-state leaders competed to market themselves as refuges from blue-state regulation.

The subtext isn’t just anti-California; it’s anti-modern governance. By emphasizing employees “around the world,” Benson turns routine enforcement into a symbol of globalized, unaccountable power. It echoes the broader conservative playbook of the period: portray coastal liberal states as empires and local taxpayers as colonies. The rhetorical move works because it converts a technical policy dispute into an emotional posture - resentment with a passport stamp.