Hacker News Reader

California is not doing anything special. The tech sector provides high paying jobs fueling high housing costs in the San Francisco Bay and other places used as second homes (WFH): Wine country (Napa/Sonoma), the Coast (Santa Cruz, Stinson, Big Sur) or the Sierras (Lake Tahoe). High paying jobs + high housing prices ---> higher taxes Taxing tech corporations is more complex and most have stored IP in low tax havens. Note that this is not specific to tech, Wal Mart, Goldman Sachs and others do the same thing.

OP stated:

> at this point my only question is whether these places go broke in my lifetime or not

I think that would be hard to do when running a $30+ billion budget surplus.

IMO a $31B surplus reeks of over-taxation! If I was a California resident I’d be demanding lower taxes now!

It's transparency that tells you whether that $31 Billion is an actual surplus, or whether there are huge off-balance sheet liabilities hiding in that state budget -- e.g. future pension obligations and the like, as well as mandated spending on other initiatives, or long term contracts signed by the state which require spending.