Posted on 05/01/2013 7:24:19 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
We recently did a head-to-head comparison of the benefits of living in California versus those for Texas.
California won by a hair.
The impetus for the piece was the burgeoning rivalry between the two states, which heated up after Texas Gov. Rick Perry ran a series of ads touting his state's friendlier business climate.
But we wanted to narrow in a bit more on all the things California has to offer that Gov. Perry may have ignored. To be clear, we have nothing against Texas — some of us are products of their finest schools.
We just think people need to be reminded that the Golden State still has a lot going for it.
1) California has lower property tax rates.
The average is 0.80%, compared with Texas' 1.74%.
Source: Tax Foundation
2) College graduation rates there are impressive.
California graduates 34.8% of its college students in four years, and 65.1% in six. Compare that with 24.4% and 49.0%, respectively, for Texas.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
3) Students get better SAT scores (though slightly fewer take them).
The average California high school student's score is 1513. In Texas it's 1446.
Source: College Board
4)The state is above average in terms of children enrolled in day care.
Just 39% of kids are not enrolled in child care in California. In Texas? 44%.
Source: KidsCount.org
5) If you're a Californian, you're less likely to die.
The 2010 mortality rate for California was 646.8 per 100,000. In Texas it's 772.3.
Source: Governing.com
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
And then there is Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown vs. Rick “Coyote Slayer” Perry.
70 % of the births at Dallas' Parkland Hospital are children of illegals.
Having lived and paid property tax in both states, I can assure you California has Texas beat.
I registered my Geo Metro for something like $56 the first year I was in Texas, and I only had to pay for a safety inspection, not an emissions test. I think registration on a brand new Toyota Highlander was something like $180. Try that in California. My marginal income tax rate in California was 9%. In Texas is was 0%. All taxes and fees are inter-related. Singling one tax/fee out as an advantage is bogus.
One of the things that attracted me to Texas was I could get out of my tiny condo and buy a spacious house without increasing my mortgage. My overall quality of life went way up when I moved, even though certain elements were degraded. And Texans were just plan better people to be around, in general.
The NappyOne
Those are all meaningless to a small business.
This was from December 2011... but nothing has changed since.
Plano, Texas, tops list of America’s safest cities
Plano, Texas, has some pretty ho-hum claims to fame: It’s home to junk-food headquarters Frito-Lay and the Dr. Pepper Snapple Group, for starters, as well as to retail giant J.C. Penney. But it’s also America’s safest city by our determination, and that’s nothing to yawn at.
Plano, a city of 278,000 that’s just outside Dallas, boasts the lowest violent crime rate of the cities we looked at and the sixth-lowest traffic fatality rate, putting it tops on our list for the second year in a row. The Las Vegas suburb of Henderson, Nev., and Honolulu come in second and third, respectively.
So what makes these metropolises oases of relative tranquility? Wealth is one key factor.
“One of the underlying things, in terms of a city’s safety, would be a very strong tax base, as there are a number of services that are reliant on it,” notes Scott B. Clark, president of the New York-based Risk and Insurance Management Society. “That includes an effective, well-staffed police department, fire department and school system.”
The median household income in Plano is $79,234, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, nearly 60 percent above the national average, and 8.1 percent of residents are below the poverty line, compared to a national rate of 15.1 percent. The city is also home to a number of Fortune 500 companies.
“Plano is a very clean, affluent suburb with no inner city per se,” says John Worrall, head of the criminology program at the University of Texas at Dallas. “Plus it has one of the few police departments in the U.S. that require four-year degrees. I don’t know that there is research to back up its making things safer, but it makes Plano unique.”
Plano boasts strong citizen involvement in public safety: the U.S. Department of Justice honored the city last year with a National Award for Excellence in Neighborhood Watch. Plano Police Chief Greg Rushin says his department works with 194 volunteers who help with tasks from patrolling neighborhoods to manning observation towers in public places and monitoring security camera feeds.
Carbon footprint? LOL!
The smog in the LA Valley is worse than I've seen in any major Texas city. The stuff burns your eyes; you can see it like a brown fog all around you. Yuck!
I'd hate to see what they'd have with a big Texas size carbon footprint - a footprint, I may add, which provides energy for their low-footprint lives...
Dang, I am depressed...I thought Texas would put out way more than that....Time to fire up the grill.
...and make the BEST Texas BBQ Evah!
I'd say 98% of Californians have no idea what can be done with a good cut of Brisket. To be fair, though there are plenty of Texans who do not know what to do with an artichoke either..LOL!
You don’t have to tell me. 40 years in California, and 17 in Texas. It just may be I have the credentials to call BS on IBD. And I do.
I didn’t live up North near Dallas. I was in Houston, where 41 lives. Years ago friends of mine actually ran into Mr. and Mrs. Bush at the theater in downtown. From what was said of the meeting, George and Barbara were the nicest of people. No pretense with them. Now, does California have anything even remotely to compare with that? No, not at all.
Texas wins by a mile.
The NappyOne
1994 (For those who don’t remember)
“The S.A.T. score of the average American high school student will soon be going up 100 points. However, that doesn’t mean that anyone is getting smarter.
Beginning in April 1995, the College Board, based in Manhattan, will be recalibrating its scoring of the Scholastic Assessment Test. The bottom score will still be 200 and the top 800, but it will be easier for everyone to get higher scores.
A 430 score on the verbal section of the S.A.T. will suddenly become a 510 under the new scoring method. A 730 verbal score will become an 800.
College Board officials know they are inviting potshots on this one. They know they are going to be accused of instantly turning a generation of Roger Marises into Babe Ruths.
“The question people will ask,” said Bradley J. Quin, a senior project director of the College Board, “is, ‘Aren’t you just making kids feel better by giving them higher scores?’ The answer is, absolutely, positively not. The performance that generates a 424 today will now generate a 500. The kid is no brighter, doesn’t have any more bright answers. It’s just the label is higher. Everyone will know.”
Mr. Quin said they were making the change so students would have a better sense of what their scores mean. When the current scoring system was established in 1941, 500 was the average score for each test, the math and verbal. Those scores have been declining for nearly four decades. The average verbal score today is 424; the average math score, 478.
So the College Board officials have decided to “recenter” the scale, changing it so the average student will once again get scores of 500 on the verbal and math tests.
That means by answering the same number of questions correctly, typical students will get about 80 extra points on the verbal test and 20 on the math. For over half a century, a raw score of 35 on the verbal test of 78 questions has translated into a 430 score; now a raw score of 35 will mean a score of 510. For the raw score, students get one point for each correct answer; they lose a quarter-point for each wrong answer.”
Actually, real estate in the part of Kalifornia that resembles Texas is dirt cheap.
It’s the gun control nonsense, and the Homo-education for the children that makes Kalifornia the loser.
Coulda fooled me. I live in the Clear Lake area. I'd say that other than being a little more humid and a lot flatter that it was an awful lot like the California coast in the southern half of the state. Certainly it is analogous to the Huntington Beach area. When I worked at Boeing, we had lots of folks relocate here from Huntington Beach/Orange County.
Virtually all of them lived in homes in California that were smaller than mine, and virtually all of them bought $450K McMansions in gated communities near where I live from the money they got from selling their California crackerboxes when they moved to Texas. (Why? Because they did not want to pay less for a house than the one they had.) Got four time the house they had in CA, and paid four times what I had paid for my Texas home.
So you may be right, but if I moved where they lived, I could not find a decent house for $150K or under.
Most of Texas is similar to the San Joaquin valley in California, and real estate is truly dirt cheap there.
Is there a “Clear Lake” in Texas?
As I understrand it, there are no natural lakes in Tx; is that correct?
Real estate in the Clear Lake area in California is much higher than the SJ valley.
LMAO!
Texas has no income tax. The California income tax rate is 8% to 9.3% for most working people. The effective tax rate is much higher in California!
Also, even though the property tax rate is higher in Texas, the property cost for the same house is double to triple or more in California so for the same home you pay more in taxes in California!
There is a “Clear Lake” in Texas. It is a brackish bay on the Galveston side of Houston. Nice area. It sports the world’s largest concentration of sailboats. It is also the location of NASA’s Houston Control.
I cannot name a natural lake in the state. I think there are a couple in the NE corner of the state.
East Texas, where I live, is a sub-tropical rain forest. We average 60” of rain fall a year. Property and land here are cheap also. We have millions of acres of forest land, much of which is open to recreation and hunting. Also, several of the best large mouth bass lakes in the country.
I have a 2400 SF log home 3-2-3 with fireplaces in the great room and master, full wrap 10’ covered porch and three car garage on 43 acres of mixed pine and hard wood across the street from the second biggest lake in the state. The largest lake is twenty minutes away. I have two boat ramps within a mile of the house. I can hunt and shoot in my back yard. There is over 600,000 acres of national forest within minutes that I can hunt for $45 a year. The county I’m in has the lowest property tax rate in the state.
I paid $270K for the property three years ago. How much would a place like this cost in California? Two million? More?
Do individual properties mean much?
We have a small ranch in the central sierra, surrounded by the Stanislaus National Forest, it has Jeffrey Pine forest, and a long meadow, with two houses on it that cost $75K about 13 years ago.
Not a fair comparison, right?
Well, this Texan has a great recipe for tuna or salmon stuffed artichokes....but I must confess that I ran across it when I lived in Oregon.
I wonder who the first person was that ever thought that any portion of an artichoke is edible??
Close to Yosemite; sounds nice. I haven’t been to that area and would like to. I’ve been in Death Valley and flown into Sacramento a couple of times. I’ve worked in Benicia and the LA basin and the in laws lived in Hemit. The wife is there now moving her mom here, in with us.
Do individual properties mean much? Not really. What is a small ranch? Out in West Texas anything under a few thousand acres is a hobby ranch...
The wife accidentally bought property at a tax auction in Trona, CA think she was buying other listings in Sandy Valley at the other end of the county. Trona was a pit and property there is cheap... I think half the population was on meth...
If I got away from the lake and bought a house that was smaller / not as well appointed we could have bought much cheaper. We looked at a place twenty miles away that had a smaller house, sheds, 5 slot carport and barn on over 80 acres with springs and a barn and corral listed at $180K...
I wonder who the first person was that ever thought that any portion of an artichoke is edible??
Someone very hungry, I suspect!
I love them myself - no stuffing..steamed well with butter and lemon dipping sauce. I learned about them during my youth in California (transplanted Texan, I was )
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