California has the HIGHEST State income tax in the nation at 9.3%. And even in state pensioners are taxed at the same rate.
California has the HIGHEST State sales tax in the nation at 7.5%.
The only break we get compared with other states is the relatively low property tax rate. But since California homes cost about DOUBLE many other states, we still end up paying the same amount annually!
The low per-capita school spending is due to the over 300,000 children of illegal immigrants, as with another 1/2 million children of legal immigrants, some of whom have only just begun funding education through their taxes.
Do your homework next time you want to voice an opinion. And educated opinion carries more weight on FreeRepublic than an ignorant one.
The proper way to measure relative tax burdens between different states is to compare each state's total tax revenues as a proportion of that state's gross domestic product, expressed as a percentage. California is a relatively low tax state, using that method, because it is so wealthy - someone said in a previous post that California is No. 6 in per capita income despite having such a large proportion of poor illegal immigrants.
Most Western European countries have far higher proprotionate tax burdens than the U.S. using this method, but Americans pay more taxes per capita than any of them because our per capita income is higher. We pay more taxes than they do per capita in absolute numbers, but our relative tax burden is considerably less.
California's state budget disaster is not happening because this is a poor state or because the state government spends too much overall (though it sure does on some things - spending is way out of whack and that makes things worse than they would otherwise be). The state budget disaster is happening because of political idiocy - the voters' as well as the politicians.
And this train wreck was predicted in the fall of 1998 - it's just a lot worse than expected. The state government was hauling in a lot of capital gains taxes and the politicians all pretended it would last forever because, for them, it did. No incumbent legislator in the fall of 1998 will have to face the voters in 2004, in that same office, for the budget decisions they made then, because of term limits. The voters want legislators to have only 6-8 years in office, so the legislators don't care what happens after they're termed out.
So, in the fall of 1998, the Democratic and Republican legislators made a deal. The Democrats voted for tax cuts in the categories that produce taxes over the long term, and the Republicans voted for lots higher spending on things which would get legislators of both parties past the next four years of elections. Both sides got drunk on the brief spurt of capital gains taxes, and to hell with the public interest.
Now we face the higher, unnecessary, spending the Democrats wanted and the Republicans went along with, plus the far lower long-term tax revenues the Republicans wanted and the Democrats went along with, without having the billion$ in capital gains tax revenues we had in 1998. Plus all the other crap we're used to from the legislature.
Naturally the necessary spending decreases will come from areas which don't produce campaign contributions to legislators and/or the governor. The prison guards are safe, as are the education bureaucrats in Sacramento. Plus the new programs created in 1998-99.