I feel like the quality of life is similar between the two. I don't feel like I was getting anything for the 13%+ extra taxes I was paying in California.
Nearly every California program has a huge amount of wastage. Take:
- High speed rail - 10x the cost of comparable European programs, still haven't built anything. Deadlocked by regulation, lawsuits, and poor planning.
- Or all the fraud in the hospice program, unchecked for years until some YouTuber just... went up to one and made a video.
- Or spending over $1M/homeless on housing the homeless and not being able to do so.
California is a lot of talk (regulations, state programs, taxes) coupled with extremely poor execution.
Some people might argue that it's not meant to be about what you personally get back. Social contract and all that...
I get your other points but this part was phrased in an unfortunate way.
For example, I would be happy paying those 13% taxes in Switzerland, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore! (Some even have lower taxes.) But I felt that money was being totally wasted in California.
I genuinely think CA is something like <10% as efficient with tax money as these countries, and it's largely because certain groups take it as a personal attack when you imply tax inefficiency is a problem.
And just like you describe, it would've been ok if all of the tax money went to the people it was meant to be, but unfortunately CA is built upon n number of middle man companies who each take something off the top.
Where, pray tell, is this state with zero taxes? Próspera?
Incorrect. For high earners, tax burden differs dramatically between states, even when you consider all kinds of tax.
Already addressed in my other reply.
But that doesn't tell us much about the relationship between that thing and their regulations. The regulations might be supporting the thing, or the thing might be so successful that the damage being done by the regulations becomes tolerable. It's entirely plausible that if other states attempted that level of regulation they'd crumple like tissue paper because they don't have the economic power of California's IT sector to balance out the excess demands being placed on businesses.
They did something right fifty years ago. Now? No. They're doing nearly everything wrong.
Top-two elections coupled with rigged ballots so voters can't really choose, and no one can prove anything (and it's against the law to try). Government program after government program that fails to solve basic problems because the money seems to up and disappear, and when the public calls for an audit the person doing the stealing gets to say "No."
187,084 homeless in California in 2024. 181,934 homeless in California in 2025 after 2024 spending of more than $2.5 billion (with a B) on homeless programs. They would have done better if they had just given every homeless person $13,363. It's the same expenditure.
Instead they spent $485,437 per person helped (5,150). The median household income in California in 2024 was $100K. So they spent four times the median household per person helped. Those are bad results.
They're driving out businesses. They're destroying the infrastructure that let them build the economic juggernaut of agriculture and tech (reservoirs left dry, water management mishandled deliberately, forest mismanagement contrary to decades of evidence).
Generally speaking, I've liked their food and consumer product safety regulations, and most of those have been emulating Europe, but most of the rest they've gotten wrong. They're still rich because of Silicon Valley and Hollywood, but they're driving away tech, and while Hollywood has a long way to tumble, it's on its way to doing that to itself.
California has a significantly better climate to be homeless in, so you'd want a bus ticket from Minnesota or whatever to there too if you were homeless.
Could be inertia.