Comment by somethoughts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somethoughts | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Resource driven economies like Texas can maintain a low income tax by deriving most of their tax revenue from property taxes and taxing oil and gas revenues.

IMHO the high income tax regime found in California is actually a function of high density, high income, knowledge based earners moving in.

If enough of them arrive, demands for services (schools, fire, police) and infrastructure (i.e. light rail, etc.) will increase. The original NIMBY locals will initially love the increasing property values and new restaurants... until their property tax bills start rising to astronomical sums.

The state will then need to push for Prop 13 like property tax capping legislation at which point the state legislature will need to raise funds somehow and magically they will end up with a 10%-20% state income tax on super high income earners like Elon, et. al.

That said - just a IMHO prediction and just saying that you can't blame it entirely on just California(ns) being dysfunctional. :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbXLnmLEevQ

Property tax values in Austin just saw the highest increase in Austin History

California actually spends less per student on education than even many poor states. For all their virtue signaling about public transport, CA don't even have universal school bus service (which is table-stake in most states). Most parents drive individually and drop kids!

Just compare the building/facilities of any top bay area public school with that of Texas. The former look like shack while the latter look like mini universities. Bay area schools still rank higher because of students and parents, its nothing to do with the state.

> The former look like shack while the latter look like mini universities. Bay area schools still rank higher because of students and parents, its nothing to do with the state.

Palo Alto High School is literally a mini university. Just do a google image search. You can't tell it apart from Stanford.

>>If enough of them arrive, demands for services (schools, fire, police) and infrastructure (i.e. light rail, etc.) will increase.

The high taxes of CA are due to the state sector having taken over the political system, via control over the dominant narrative/ideology.

To give just one example, emergency workers can retire at 55 with 90% of their pension, that averages $108,000 per year.

California now has $1 trillion in pension obligations for its unionized public sector workers.

Property tax values or property taxes? If Austin is like other cities, then if houses all rise the same amount of value, then the property taxes assessed remain the same (the percentage goes down). Any increase in spending (and therefore raise in revenue from property taxes) would have to be done explicitly (they don't just get a windfall from rising property values).

This seems like a bizarre way to torture the narrative to say high taxes are good, no, required?

Have you seen where the money goes? It ain’t supporting a “technology infrastructure”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com