Yep. I'm in FL, working on fancy virtual machine software. I have coworkers in TX.

These places are not for everybody. Lots of things that save money are just offensive to the typical CA voter. The words "Don't California my Texas" came into being because crowds of CA voters would evacuate from the mess they had created, then vote for more of the same. If they succeed, then where will they go?

So don't just look at the price. You might hate the policy, culture, and law.

Just because people repeat tropes about California or any other state doesn’t mean they’re actually based on data or fact.

According this data [1], Ohio has a higher overall tax burden than California. Does anyone from Texas criticize Ohio’s tax burden? No, because Ohio isn’t part of the demonization of California as a liberal regulatory dystopia.

In reality, California is a pretty normal state with normal people and many of the same problems as other states.

If you’re in Texas, the overall tax rate might be only a percent or two different than California, at least according to my linked chart.

https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-bur...

If this data is flawed, I’ll be glad to eat my own words.

The nuance is this: the data looks at total state taxes paid as a percent of personal income. So if you're earning an average OH salary of say $90k, and your total taxes are around $8k, that comes to 9% or whatever.

But now imagine your an SV engineer who relocates to OH and is making $200k (after COLA reduction). Your personal state income tax rate tops out at 4.7%, which is perhaps 6% lower than what you were paying in CA.

Also, you have a mansion that's 3x the size of anything you could afford in SV, and it only costs $300k. So your property tax is under $6k (versus $20k in SV).

So while the tax burden on average might be higher in OH, the tax burden for high earners would be much less of a percentage of income.

California does have one of the most progressive taxation schemes in the country. That means the more well off complain louder. Because most people don't really understand taxes that well (for one thing, half of the nationwide population only pays FICA, which is more forced retirement savings than an income tax), they seem to assume that if the rich are complaining about high taxes then they must be suffering from high taxes, too.

Wikipedia says: "At 7.25%, California has the highest minimum statewide sales tax rate in the United States, which can total up to 10.50% with local sales taxes included."

Sales tax is not normally considered progressive.

With such a high sales tax, you'd expect to not also pay state income tax, and you'd expect low property taxes. This is not the case.

I don't think anybody should leave California. If you vote to create a disaster, you should stay to enjoy it. No other state wants you voting to replicate that.

The combined average sales tax is 8.6% in California (https://taxfoundation.org/state/california/) and 7% in Florida (https://taxfoundation.org/state/florida/). Both states exempt groceries. That's not much of a difference even if we zero in on sales taxes, but in any event it's entirely possible for California to have a relatively high tax burden on the lower classes while also having a relatively high progressive taxation scheme. Indeed, precisely because Florida has no income tax is also precisely why it's taxation scheme is less progressive than in California and possibly even regressive.

Further more, California has a state earned income credit, the highest in the nation: https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/individuals/earned-in...

The real issue in California is cost of housing, but that has almost nothing to do with taxation rates, per se. (Not trying to open a discussion about Prop 13 and property taxes....)

FWIW, I originally chose not to paste this citation regarding relative progressive schemes: https://taxfoundation.org/which-states-have-most-progressive... The methodology seemed highly suspicious to me. For example, if a state had a 100% taxation bracket at $1 trillion of income, then if I understand it correctly it would be the most progressive but quite obviously for a meaningless reason.

CA has an AMT. Until Trump's tax reform, you would have paid federal and CA AMT if you had a big payday (a payday of appreciable size typically happens once or twice to SV folks; they are not 'rich' by any stretch of the imagination, when cost of housing, living, and retirement are considered, but they can still get caught up in this AMT trap).

Ohio does not have an AMT. Somewhat surpisingly, Ohio does have a Capital Gains tax, similar to CA, but I'm not sure how they compare.

You have to look at other taxes: lots of people move to “low tax” states and then realize they’re making up the difference in property and sales taxes, or lower quality services.

Property tax rates may be higher elsewhere, but the cost of the real estate is so much lower that it more than makes up for it. I'd be interested to know if there are any low-tax states where someone can spend $25k/yr in property tax on a 3bd/2ba, which is the going rate in Palo Alto.

Also, I don't think any state has sales tax rates that are much higher than SMC/SCC.

California is not Palo Alto for a majority of its residents. My point was just that you can’t just look at the state tax rates in isolation to make an accurate comparison. There are definitely cheaper places to live but the differences are not as pronounced as they might seem - usually within a couple percent. Property costs where you want to live are likely to be a far greater impact on your budget.

It’s like when Americans say they pay less in taxes than Europeans without factoring in that our healthcare costs are paid separately. Systems built around different models need to be compared carefully.

that logic only works if you're saving a large fraction of your paycheck. If you're spending most of your paycheck, that invariably winds up getting taxed somehow, and only the overall state tax revenue fraction matters.

It's true that states need to get revenue from somewhere, so property tax rates may be higher. But the property costs are so much lower, even high rates would result in lower tax burden.

Basically, other states do not necessarily raise as much revenue as CA overall. CA provides lots of services (which you may or may not use), which contributes to the high overall taxation.

It depends on a ton of variables, but it can be boiled down to two: how the tax is distributed based off of various demographics, and how much total tax is levied. Unless you have some reason to believe that the tax distribution is better for you - for instance, if you save half of your paycheck and are moving to a state without income tax - then the only thing that matters is the overall level of taxation.

That really depends on spending habits. If you travel out of state regularly then you receive the same benefit as savings.

On top of that State spending and the relative tax burden on each income range can also vary significantly.

Where do all the taxes collected by California go?

I live in Massachusetts and we have a substantially lower overall tax burden. We also have the best public schools in the country, and the highest rate of health insurance, due to our very generous MassHealth program. What is California doing with their tax dollars?

California revenues are about $425 billion.

Medi-Cal covers 1 in 3 residents. $100 Billion per year program (or about 23% of the revenues). $25 Billion a year for government employees' pensions and retiree health (note that this is not current govt employees! BTW, that's gonna continue growing without bounds). $78 Billion on education (K-12).

These together account for a huge chunk of the money. Very little on infrastructure spending and such (the roads are worse than third-world those in third-world countries here).

BTW, folks like Zuckerberg (the 1%) contribute roughly 50% of the revenues! If the market takes a hit, CA hurts real bad.

> California revenues are about $425 billion.

California State General Fund + Special Funds revenue for FY 2030-2021 were estimated in the most recent budget revise at $182.278 billion. Not sure where you got $425 billion from.

> Medi-Cal covers 1 in 3 residents. $100 Billion per year program (or about 23% of the revenues

This is misleading, because only $38 billion of the $113 billion annual Medi-Cal costs comes from State revenue; $47 billion from state + local revenue and $66 billion comes from federal funds.

> $25 Billion a year for government employees' pensions and retiree health (note that this is not current govt employees! BTW, that's gonna continue growing without bounds).

Current pension + retiree health be benefits are paid out of contributions from when employers were working and investment returne thereon by the retirement system, not current revenue (current contributions come from current revenue, in part, but are part of program cost.) The only part that's really separate for retirement is state payments to pay down existing unfunded liabilities.)

> the roads are worse than third-world those in third-world countries here).

No, they aren't. They aren't even worse than Mexico.

> BTW, folks like Zuckerberg (the 1%) contribute roughly 50% of the revenues!

The top 1% household income threshold is ~$475k, Zuckerberg’s income is around 30,000× that.

The people who are around the top 1% are, by income ratio, far closer to beggars on the street than they are to Zuckerberg.

These figures are a few years old. You can't seriously consider 2020-2021 figures, considering how all economic activity has essentially been shut down for a solid 3-6 months. Revenue has plummeted.

Revenue numbers I quoted included the federal contributions, not CA alone. You can split hairs all you want about general fund vs. other subdivisions, but the fact remains that CA is an insane boom-and-bust state (it has been that way for the majority of its history) as far as its fiscal picture goes.

> You can't seriously consider 2020-2021 figures, considering how all economic activity has essentially been shut down for a solid 3-6 months.

FY 2018-2019, completely pre-shutdown (July 2018-June 2019) was $214 billion in revenue.

Is it true that the super-rich pay higher tax rates? My understanding is most of them have great accountants, and the salaries they pay themselves are generally very low. They use loopholes (intentional or unintentional by the government) to avoid the high income tax rates. Which is why I find the whole fantasy around raising income tax rates to tax the rich to be a smokescreen, and not very well researched. It'd hardly affect the super-rich. The top 1% will mostly be salaried people who can't use the loopholes.

CA has a capital gains tax, also an AMT. And it's generally not possible to escape much of CA taxes (most SV founders/CEOs anticipating a big payday shift domicile to FL and similar tax-free jurisdictions for this reason).

The state also extended the eye-wateringly high top tax bracket for another decade or so, I think... Even with all that, with this year's debacle, CA has probably blown through its rainy-day surplus and then some.

The numbers do not lie. CA taxes the high-earners and rich quite heavily (to practically Scandinavian levels).

I don't understand CA's taxation as much, except the income taxes are very high with little in terms of actual quality of life improvements. I do understand Canadian and UK taxation somewhat and most rich people don't pay themselves a high salary. There are "City of London" loopholes people can use to form a company and not pay tax. There's another one in the UK, where income not sourced inside the UK isn't tax, and that can be used in creative ways. Which means you can form a company in a tax haven and move your revenues there. In Canada, the corporate tax rate is like 15% and goes down to 9% for small business. And of course there are other avenues through which people form charities for tax avoidance and what not that I haven't dug deeper into. A lot of companies in the US also use the double Irish (closed now) and other similar schemes, don't they? I might not know as much here, so would love to know more. I highly doubt millionaires and billionaires pay 50%+ tax rates anywhere. They would be using loopholes I think. Kind of why I believe income tax is for the most part a failed scheme if you want to tax the rich. Tiered sales taxes might actually achieve more fair taxation.

CA is a first-world country (comparable), whose politics and governance are closer to a third-world populist state (India comes to mind). Insane giveaways and voter-mandated initiatives that take budgetary decisions out of elected representatives' hands (this one is both too much democracy and too little democracy at the same time!)

As far as taxing people effectively is concerned, I do not think there are simple answers to be found. As you yourself know, it's possible to clean dirty money simply by setting up complicated ownership structures in jurisdictions such as Jersey. But that only works for the substantially rich. The large majority of high-earners who are very successful professionals at or near the top of their fields end up shouldering a lot of the burden as far as income taxes are concerned. These people can not afford the advice needed to shelter their assets, so they end up getting caught in every revenue raising scheme.

High sales taxes are a terrible idea. CA taxes sales heavily (no VAT, but very high relative to other states), but it ends up being heavily anti-poor, because most poor are the working poor, and they must spend the majority of their incomes on essentials such as food, shelter and transportation. The sky-high gas taxes and surcharges also affect the poor the most in a similar fashion. If the goal of the taxation system is to be progressive, then sales taxes are the direct opposite of that. As are payroll taxes, for the most part.

Zuckerberg is way higher than 1%, a tiny silver of a fraction of 1%. "The 1%" are like senior engineers at FAANG or a successful dentist running their own clinic.

That's true. Unbelievable though it is, FAANG guys/gals are comfortably in the top 2-3%

> I live in Massachusetts and we have a substantially lower overall tax burden

Not according to https://taxfoundation.org/state-local-tax-collections-per-ca... (state+local per capita) or https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/state-collections-... (state only per capita).

This table has a breakdown of state revenues: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/stc/tables/2019/FY2... I don't see any significant revenue sources, relative to sales or income taxes, that might offset the burden per individual. And in California corporate taxes make up 14% of state revenue, but only 10% in Massachusetts.

Revenues isn’t a great way to look at it, because that is heavily skewed by average income. A better metric is Tax Burden percentage, which basically combines all tax sources. California is higher than MA by .5%. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/tax-burden-...

Can you substantiate the claim that MA has the best public schools in the country? I consistently hear about the Chicago suburbs (Naperville, Evanston), Westchester (Scarsdale, Rye, Chappaqua), Long Island (Jericho, Great Neck), and Main Line PA (Tredyffrin, Lower Merion). I never hear about MA schools.

Honestly, just do a Google search, there’s a ton of articles. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/education

I see. Looking at the methodology, they’re averaging out the state. This means that the average school district is better than any school district, on average.

But I wouldn’t go as far as saying “MA has the best public schools in the country.” It seems like they are just uniformly above average, whereas NY and Illinois have terrible school districts, mixed in with legitimately the best school districts in the nations.

40.7% goes to K-12 education. 11.9% to higher education. 21.0% to health. That is the top 3 expenditures.

Unfortunately for people in NY, you still have to pay income tax there no matter where you live in the US. If you're lucky you'll work in a state with no state income tax and it will be a wash, otherwise your tax preparer is going to have a fun time.