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Comment by siberianbear | Hacker News Reader

Speaking for myself, I was glad to escape California. Not only because of real estate, but also because of taxation. A top marginal state tax rate of 13.3%? OUCH!

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California's total tax burden is 9.5% of income; the median state is Kansas at 8.5% [1]. I was surprised the difference is so small; is there something not captured by these stats?

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

Inequality isn’t captured, CA relies more heavily on the top earners to fund the budget.

> Inequality isn’t captured, CA relies more heavily on the top earners to fund the budget.

Because of the high reliance on regressive parcel taxes on property (because of Prop 13 limits on ad valorem property taxes that doesn't effect parcel taxes) and regressive sales taxes combined with progressive income tax, California state and local taxes are, in net, regressive at the low end and progressive at the high end; most other groups below the top 1% pay less, proportionately, in taxes than the bottom 20%.

https://itep.org/whopays/california/

Plus a 9.5% / 10.25% sales tax rate if you're fortunate enough to live in LA or Santa Monica. I believe SF is around there as well.

So now we need to compare different apples with different apples again, avoiding comparison of different apples with same oranges?

That seems.... reasonable to me? (As someone who is in a fairly high tax bracket and who wishes our local taxes were higher on folks like me so we had better services.)

It’s much higher than even the second highest, NY.

Is there a way you can donate your excess cash to fund the services improvements you want?

Would be cool if you could voluntarily fund specific services (schools/homeless) and lower the tax burden on others

Higher salaries make up for higher taxes. That number you see in your pay statement before taxes was never going to be yours.

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