Federal taxes are still much higher than state taxes. How is the federal government helping the situation?

The role of the federal government isn't to interfere in an individual state's affairs. In fact, if this weren't the case there wouldn't be much reason to have states at all.

California's current situation is actually a very compelling argument in favor of states. If you don't like California's policies, you can move to another state that can have vastly different policies. That wouldn't be true if the federal government just homogenized every state. I shudder to imagine a version of the United States where the entire country runs with the efficiency and policy foresight of California.

I agree, but my point is that federal taxes as disproportionately higher.

With software performance optimization, it's best to focus on the most expensive problems first. A few hundred dollars per quarter for state taxes vs. a few thousand is a massive difference.

Taxes are a broad topic, but it generally comes down to $ in vs value out. Now, in the United States, in general, it's fairly obvious that the citizens aren't getting as much value out as they should, which is a completely valid criticism. However, I would still argue that the federal government is providing more value per dollar than California is, even if it's purely because the federal government does less to interfere with its citizens than the state of California. Once you get to this point in the discussion though, the topic has moved entirely away from where we began.

edit: This would be an interesting topic for analysis, as it's a subject that gets over-simplified for the sake of political expedience. So if anyone has some interesting analysis on the topic that doesn't have too much political bias attached, I'd love to read it!

One thing the FG has not done is to massively invest in repairing/upgrading infrastructure across the country (as China has recently done with its grid). I'd guess that is responsible for the recent demonstrations of CA's crumbling electric grid. Funding for high-speed rail being another example.

This is only one of the obvious outcomes of massive overseas expenditures in decades-long warring. The benefits of those (non-transparent) expenditures are not flowing to our people.