California's population dropped by 500k in 2 years
news.yahoo.com
news.yahoo.com
I don't think the goal is to pack the majority of the US population into 2-3 states and a dozen cities.
Over the past decade we've already seen other states see economic growth and inflows that resulted in high housing prices - Washington State, Oregon, hell, even Colorado is crazy expensive compared to 20 years ago.
I think it would be great if people moved to lower cost of living states and improve the economic growth there.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/republicans-senate-2024...
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/democrats-senate-chance...
Also, California has the most Republican voters of any state, there is no reason to assume the people leaving are mostly Democrats.
Still bring that bougie California BS w/ them tho.
Laramie county also has a big chunk of Democrats as it is a college town. ~6000 of that 7815 are the students and I assume most of the rest are staff members
[1] - https://sos.wyo.gov/Elections/Docs/VRStats/2023/23FebVR_Stat...
Oregon is getting hit pretty bad with Californian immigrants. Prices in places like Bend are nuts now. Too bad there’s no way for states to control immigration from other states.
The first word in the name of the country is "the" and the first name in the name of the country is "states". Right?
Yeah, not really. But you can always hitchhike over to the state they left and shit on the sidewalk, and then rob a Walgreens with no repercussions whatsoever.
Take a number...
There was a time in this country (back in the 50s and 60s) where the highest tax rate on income was near 90%, and corporate tax rates were several times higher than now.
We've fooled ourselves into thinking that CA is "the worst for taxes" when we aren't. We certainly don't carry the lowest tax burden, but this isn't a race for the top or bottom, but what you get for it.
I'd argue one of the daftest things about US discourse on taxes is the absolutism of whether "taxation is theft" (it isn't, it's part of the cost of doing business as a country) but what is the return on the service quality of those taxes, are their uses auditable, is the transparency around them good...it usually isn't, but then we also do nothing to improve that, which makes most of our perpetually binary and dumb tax talk that much more annoying.
California is famous for squandering wealth on huge projects, aren't they? Wasn't like 60k per homeless person spent? We live on different planets.
It's awful to do business in/with California, sorry. And yes their taxes are awful. The worst in the USA dude, I'm so confused..? Who is worse?
Good luck.
Eg. 15% of 10k is 1.5k, whereas 15% of 100k is 15k ;)
It is a mazlows hierarchy style argument. You shouldn't be taxed on the income you need to eat. You should be taxed gently on the income you need for basic comfort. You should be taxed more heavily on the income used for luxuries etc etc
To be honest, I am not exactly sure what the original goals behind progressive taxes are? Is the goal to discourage employers from giving out exorbitantly large salaries? Is it to equalize salaries? Or simply to collect more taxes from those who can afford it? Or something else?
I agree having better criteria around the goals we want to achieve like you suggest should drive our taxation systems. But if we say no taxes for food, is it organic food? What if someone is allergic to common food (gluten, lactose...) and price is significantly higher?
How about basic comforts? By virtue of being significantly taller than average, I have to pay the premium for larger cars simply to be able to fit inside (I still drive a sedan and not a SUV: they don't get more space inside). And need custom beds, taller kitchen counters... All of this is more expensive than mass-produced furniture or smaller cars. And even for "luxury" items like flying long haul, you can't tell me it's fair that for the same price, some people get 4" in front of their knees to the backrest in front, and I get my knees stuck into that same backrest. I understand that from the sellers' perspective, but to get the same comfort, I need to pay more for premium economy.
Basically, progressive tax is an attempt at some form of equalization, but I wonder which one is it, so I can have a better opinion of how we can achieve fairness.
But saying how those who earn more should pay more, when they already do, is simply silly.
I cannot tell if you're being disingenuous or genuinely don't realise that people saying that mean:
"those who earn more should pay a bigger slice of their income"
The goals are literally as I have described.
I've also literally gave counter-examples why "the goals ... as [you] described" are not sufficient to justify progressive taxation being introduced: different people have different needs (and thus costs) for any of the categories of expenditure you bring up, yet this is unsolved by progressive taxation.
IOW, I am looking for a better reasoned argument than just "rich people should pay even more" (when higher income does not necessarily mean richer people: we all know how really rich people can play with accounting and get by on $1 salaries).
There are taxation schemes which do take a bunch of these criteria in: eg. property taxes for a lived-in home vs rented-out home, tax benefits based on the number of dependents etc.
But progressive taxation is not contextual in that sense, so I want goals to be publicly stated so we can reason about whether they are a good solution or not.
I don't think anyone thinks that's fair.
Context: For net worth over 30 million
Leaving this out is disingenuous
https://moskowitzllp.com/californias-exit-tax-explained/
It's basically a wealth tax of 0.4% on assets above $30M, worldwide.
If you leave the state - pay all the taxes due, you are still responsible to pay that wealth tax for 10 years.
No distinction is made for assets acquired prior to moving to California. You could acquire wealth prior to moving to California, then as soon as you're a resident you have to pay it, and for 10 years after you leave.
What's going to happen is that people with that kind of wealth just won't move to California and people who might have that kind of wealth will make sure they leave before they trigger it.
It's a terrible law. Reminds me of places like New Jersey which did an amazing job chasing all their high-net worth people out of the state.
> What's going to happen is that people with that kind of wealth just won't move to California
Even more of a reason to introduce it on a federal level
And wealth taxes have failed miserably everywhere they've been tried. France instituted one a few years back and it failed to capture even a small percentage of expected revenue - people just do whatever they can to avoid it, including leaving the country.
Most of the fearmongering is also pretty lame, for the same reasons -- "soon it will be the 5-millionaires!" -- which is, again, far removed from the average Californian, even the average STEM worker in Cali outside of mid-to-high level FAANG types.