And yet Californians pay enormous taxes.
Also, my power in San Francisco has probably been out for no more than 6 hours over the last 10 years. I don't know how many 9s that is, but it's more than 1.
https://www.prudential.com/financial-education/tax-burden-by...
To critique your link based on its footnotes:
> 1 Calculated based on “State Individual Income Tax Rates and Brackets for 2020” from the Tax Foundation and “Median Household Income by State: 2018 and 2019” according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
What is the distribution of households in each state by marital and dependent status?
> 2 Calculated based on “Property Taxes by State” from WalletHub and “Median Home Values Across the U.S.” from Experian.
Various propositions in California affect actual property taxes. In the chart in your link the property tax tax burden is shown the same for California and Texas based on Median income, but the actual property tax rate in Texas is almost double that in California (at least last I checked, a couple of years ago). Housing in California has just been more expensive compared to income, which is a con in affordabilty, but a pro in net worth for property owners (especially those who have owned for a long time, and thus pay lower taxes on their primary residence).
I've got nothing to say about the sales tax burden, except to wonder how much of the "per capita personal consumption expenditures" are taxable transactions, and how much aren't. I've got no clue here though.
https://wallethub.com/edu/states-with-highest-lowest-tax-bur...
Part of this is because California is the most populous state with a high average personal income.
When talking about actual tax burden averages the best way to calculate is by dividing the total state and local taxes by the total income in the state.
https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/state-and-local-t...
In 2020 the total tax rate in California was 10.01% of total personal income. This put it at 37th place among the US states, and 0.52% above the US average.
For the other most populous states, Texas was at 8.56%, Florida at 7.21%, and New York at 13.92%.
The cheapest state was Alaska at 7.13% (with Florida the second cheapest), and the most expensive state was New York (with Hawaii the second most expensive at 13.16%).
Some of this data is confounded by state revenues not being solely from taxes (or especially from personal taxes). Regardless though, California isn't that much above average, and is one of 30 states with a graduate state income tax that hits higher earners harder than lower earners, whereas 11 states have a flat tax structure.
delusional
Most third world countries don’t allow organized crime and persistent retail theft the way SF does. Theirs governments take harsh measures to crack down on such lawlessness.
Depending on whether you mean de jure or de facto when you say “allow”, this is either not a difference or not true.
Those were in a single grouping.
I’m currently in SE Asia: factually, they don’t allow organized retail theft akin to what I’ve seen in Seattle or SF.
Their downtowns also aren’t littered with drug zombies.
There's different tradeoffs between, say, Bangkok and San Francisco in terms of what is tolerated (i.e, drugs) and what isn't.
That it’s very strange that SF (and Seattle) are so much wealthier and developed, but I routinely see organized retail crime in those cities — but not in much poorer countries, who maintain a stricter social order.
as it turns out, cloistered and fear-mongering tech bros don't really have an accurate bearing on reality. as a relatively normal person I am happy to report that despite being a suburban car-dependent hellhole, the bay area is very much a "first world" metro.
Speaking of delusional …
You’ve been without utility power for two full weeks in 2023?!
Amazingly this is not the worst US utility company. They are all pretty horrible.
There was an eight day outage, a four day outage, and a couple ~24 hour outages.
Surprisingly very few short outages or brownouts or anything.
I’m sitting at having utility power ~95% of the time over the past 12 months. I’d have no problem believing two weeks… or more.
But now a lot more people run AC and electric car charging, among other things like induction ranges. The infrastructure is struggling to keep up. A lot of it is super old and it’s not uncommon to come across 50 year old transformers, etc.
Brownouts and blackouts have become rather common.
But the gas always works. Where I live a lot of people have installed natural gas generators.
This is a surprising assertion to me. How can “most people” afford batteries and generators?
This year, most people with just batteries lost power due to no sun, and people with just generators lost power due to no propane delivery service/supply.
Based on the one ~ 3 day outage I had, my whole house generator's tank is good for probably close to two weeks, although if it were very hot or very cold, that might change. I have a portable generator for my well, that one runs on gasoline and doesn't sip fuel, I'd probably just run it for a few minutes twice a day (did not have that generator during the 3 day outage... we were just stinky)
You would assume wrong. California's grid reliability statistics are actually better than the national average:
Electric Utility Performance: A State-By-State Data Review https://www.citizensutilityboard.org/wp-content/uploads/2021...
The only statistic where it falls last is "AVERAGE AMOUNT OF TIME TO RESTORE POWER PER CUSTOMER, IN MINUTES (CAIDI) WITH MAJOR EVENT DAYS"
Compare the California's power reliability with West Virginia's before making any assumptions.
It’s like if your a top basketball player but you come last in movement speed.
Should California utilities be better at restoring power in these situations? Absolutely, and we shouldn't cut them much slack in that regard. But that doesn't mean it's a "3rd world country" situation with respect to power reliability like the GP described. The typical power problems faced in developing countries are daily power reliability problems that are due to poor grid management in normal conditions, not exceptional conditions.
To give you context our place in SA was having a couple hours loadshedding a day, and here in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods our power was gone for three fucking weeks, and just yesterday was in and out three times.
It’s absolutely third world country level when the weather is anything but exactly 70 degrees. You have zero idea what you’re talking about, the original guy is correct.
Same here. I've sat in the sweltering tropical heat with nary a fan for relief, so I well understand what I'm talking about.
> To give you context our place in SA was having a couple hours loadshedding a day, and here in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods our power was gone for three fucking weeks, and just yesterday was in and out three times.
In my Bay Area neighborhood there have been no outages for the last 3 years, but my individual anecdote is no more or less valid than yours when generalizing about California at large. It's a huge state with incredible variability in nearly every dimension.
Local conditions matter greatly. I'm in a dense urban environment, near hospitals and fire stations. That's probably why our power is more reliable. We have friends who live in wealthy wooded and hilly area of the Peninsula who have lost power for days this past winter, because those crazy storms made so many trees fall on power lines.
Your power problems sound highly localized, and you are right to be upset about it, but it's on your utility, not the overall grid.
Highly localized across the entire bay for the atmospheric river a couple weeks ago.
Again, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
They are not on a different grid at all. Most of California, and definitely the entire Bay Area is part of the same grid managed by CAISO:
https://www.caiso.com/Pages/default.aspx
Palo Alto has its own municipal utility. There is a huge difference. A municipal utility is only responsible for retail electric sales and distribution infrastructure in a specific area. That includes local substations and power lines, which are the likely source of your electricity reliability problems.
Palo Alto doesn't manage supply and demand in real time, maintaining 60Hz AC, or run the wholesale electricity markets. CAISO does those, along with transmission and regional interconnects, all of which are functions of the electric grid. The meanings of words matter when discussing these things.
> Again, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Thank you for the pleasant feedback.
What more would you like explained here?
Live with PG&E and live with PAU and then talk about it. Semantics are totally irrelevant.
Granted, once the propane rationing started, a few of our neighbors lost power for extended periods of time (weeks). The phone company doesn’t maintain internet if the power is out, but there is starlink, and fiber co-ops are starting to spring up.
This is the SF Bay Area, so it’s pretty much a third world country if you measure things by quality of government services. I assume this isn’t typical for most other parts of the country.