Poor California

I was the Technical Director of sfgate.com, the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, pretty much from its inception, from 1997 until 2003. I still have sfgate.com as my home page even though I moved from San Francisco to Tennessee over five years ago. I’m still interested in what’s going on in San Francisco and I check it out daily.

Reading articles and comments on SFgate I often see the argument that California only gets back 80 cents on the dollar from its contributions to the federal government, and that therefore it’s everybody else’s fault that the state is bankrupt. The implication being that the federal government, i.e., all of us non-Californians, owe the California government billions of dollars.

Well, yeah, there are a lot of rich people in California. If you want to live in the beautiful parts of California, you pretty much have to be rich. Because they are rich, they pay a lot of taxes. Rich people pay most of the taxes in the U.S. And they don’t get a lot of money back from the federal government. They’re not on welfare. They’re not in jail. They don’t need food stamps or medicaid. They’re rich.

When people talk about this unfair deal that California is getting from the rest of us, they imply that somehow the state government of California is sending all this money to Washington and only getting some of it back. But it is not the California state government that is sending money to D.C., it’s individual taxpayers in California.

Not only are they sending lots of money to Washington, they are also sending lots of money to Sacramento. California is one of the very highest tax states in the union, and these taxes mostly come from rich people, income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, and various exorbitant fees.

So if anyone deserves a better shake from the federal government, it is not the state government of California, it is the individual tax payers of California, primarily the rich individual tax payers of California.

Once the bankrupt state of California succeeds in driving out enough businesses and prosperous people, they will then begin to receive more money from Washington than is sent, just like Mississippi and Louisiana. Then all will be well.