> 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%