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.