Can California continue to raise taxes infinitely?

A big reason for the bay area’s population decline is and will be the fact that now, an employee doesn’t have to pay 3k for an apartment and take BART to work, dealing with the commute and the cost of commutation, but now that same employee may be able to live in Indiana and pay 1k for the same apartment, and have no commutation costs.

Taxes, will always need to be raised. It’s simply a reaction to inflation, if nothing else.

I’ve always wondered at California’s cost of living. I was stationed out there for a few years when I was in the Navy and was astounded at how much people were charged for all sorts of things. I suspect what you will find is that California will eventually declare bankruptcy. There was and continues to be an exodus of companies leaving because of the taxes and real estate prices. It isn’t just corporate taxes, it is the taxes and the costs to the employees. The companies have to pay more to employees to just get them back to square one with the level of accommodation much of the rest of the country already enjoys. As those companies leave, so do at least some of the employees. Fewer people and companies means fewer tax dollars coming in. Meanwhile, in many areas the homeless situation is growing. More homeless means more people needing those tax dollars. Add to that decades of wasteful spending and extremely generous commitments for government employee retirements and it really adds up. At some point, they will have more people needing more money than those actually paying taxes can afford.
If you are looking for that “Fuck it” point, I would say for large corporations that will be when the cost of leaving is more that offsetting the cost of staying. For small businesses, I would say it is that point where the taxes and the need for increased employee pay makes their businesses no longer profitable or worth the effort. For individuals, it would vary. Many looking at upcoming retirements will want to leave so their retirement income will get more bang for the buck. For other individuals it would be a point where they might decide to try look for employment elsewhere. The same pay with less taxes would be a net increase for them.

It’s easy enough to bad mouth California and San Francisco in particular. Prior to the pandemic there were trends here that bothered me quite a bit. But here’s the deal. These stories about picking up and leaving California are almost certainly true. But it is the type of people who are leaving to which we should pay attention. When I arrived in San Francisco in 1966, the city had a population approaching 600 thousand people. Today the town is bulging with about 850,000 people. I can’t speak for the rest of the state, but the transformation in the Bay area has been disturbing in its frantic growth of population. Those emigrants the op is talking about are the educated and high earning kids of the rest of you who continue to flood this state like nobody’s business. The transformation of what used to be the sleepy communities in the Bay Area is beyond stunning. Those of you who believe California will go
bankrupt should consider the fact that I could sell the house I’m sitting in and probably buy the town in which you are living.

All of you, good answers. I think one small benefit of the covid crisis has been the liberation of office staff. They have realized and so have their bosses, that there is little or no need for a real physical office any more. This allows employees and managers to work from home or anywhere else (including a beach or a park), with no measurable loss of productivity. Perhaps that will take some of the pressure of city, county and state budgets. However, we know as @MrGrimm888 stated that taxes will keep going up anyway. When people have no need to stay, government has to be a little more careful in not providing incentives to leave. I have seen no evidence of that happening yet, but these things take time.

No. But keep in mind that if the country was stood on end, all the nuts would roll to California. Or so I’ve been told…

I’ve reached that limit. The only thing stopping me now is my wife’s family. She doesn’t want to move to far away from them. The Wealth tax may be the tipping point for her as well. It’s a beautiful state with great weather but I’m living in a gilded cage and I want out.

@Jaxk You selfish, greedy bugger (LOL). Where are you thinking of moving?

I have family that transferred out of the Sacramento area recently. They went to PA. They said it wasn’t only the high cost of living.
Everytime our gas is below $2 pg I message a few friends in Cali just to rattle their cages.
Not all Californians are liberal either, just to be clear. Those people are miserable there, that I know.

@stanleybmanly Does your money insulate you from the negatives? Is that why you defend it so often?

I am not a rich man, just damned lucky. I arrived in this town in 1966 on a Greyhound. I was pissed about a blizzard that was savaging everything West of the Mississippi. I didn’t do anything more exceptional than buy a piece of property before 1978 and proposition 13.

But do you know who it is that is fleeing San Francisco? Since sometime in the 70s there has been a huge exodus from and rejection of the town by young families with children. I have a special tour for visitors of the town’s vacant school buildings. You would not believe the numbers that attest to the fact that this has not been a town for families, and this has been true for decades. And this isn’t merely testimony to the failures of public education, the catholic schools are closing down with equal dispatch as are the parish churches themselves. It is truly phenomenal and the tour of the magnificent yet vacant churches would make for another worthwhile enterprise. The bottom line is that this has always been a party town, where the bars outnumbered the churches at a ratio of 50 to1 in the days when those churches were thriving. The real estate situation drives everything, and you cannot convince me that this town is not richer than God. Renters take it in the shorts, but the huge bulge of 6 figure earning techies distort the economy and realities of living like nothing you will ever see. The pandemic may mean tax shortfalls, but the government in this town has more money than God. The town has a huge inventory of subsidized housing for seniors and the disabled, as well as the social services to match. The town is just crammed with more restaurants and eateries than you can count and at the end of the day, surplus food is distributed to the needy in quantities you would have to see to believe. It’s no wonder that we have a bulging homeless population. You would have to be truly crazy to subject yourself to a Chicago winter or Arizona Summer or scrape by homeless in our shriveling heartland and rustbelt deserts.

@stanleybmanly Had to finish with your snark again.
Tsk tsk.
I always heard it was a wild party town so no surprise its not big on family values haha!
So what do your tax dollars get you there? Great fire, water, schools, infrastructure, roads?

All of those things. The water is from the pristine hetch hetchy reservoir. The fire department is one of the best in the country and the public infrastructure? In a place where the average run of the mill house will set you back a million bucks, you can just guess what the state and city will squeeze in property taxes from the newcomers who snatch up the real estate. So the money is there to lavish on public infrastructure. Don’t get me wrong. The real estate situation dictates that the cost of living is through the roof. $75 parking tickets and $15 hamburgers— it’s almost terrifying to watch. But the young people crowd here and gang up in scandalously overpriced apartments like kids at an amusement park. In fact, it would probably be cheaper to live in Disneyland. It’s a dystopian existence, but who would have ever thought there would be so tremendous an advantage in simply living long enough to have no house note?

@stanleybmanly My ex-FIL worked for PG&E. He had a co-worker that had married long ago and who had bought small house in Marin. At the time, it was a nothing of a little town. He worked for the city and his wife was the town librarian. They lived there quite a few years and paid off their house. Then, they ended up having to sell their house because as Marin became “the” place to be, the property taxes went up so much that they could no longer afford to live there. They didn’t make enough money. That always seemed like a truly cautionary tale…you own your house outright and cannot afford to keep it.

Taxes are essentially designed to pay for any country, to provide essential services.

However. Large amounts of the tax money, go to things that don’t serve the country. Or, at least, not the tax payers. A lot of that money, goes to other countries. In large part, to allow America to have some level of power, over that place.
Power to use them for military, or resource control, for our purposes….
California, for example, makes a lot of money for the US.
But. The money is going to increase our interests in other countries. Not to help against natural disasters, or help the people who live there…

It’s hard, to not sound isolationist. But I think we should take care of our own, before handing out trillions, to other countries….

It seems ridiculous, to me, that we have SO many homeless people, when we could help them. But. We prioritize spending so much, on keeping our country’s ability to influence other countries, in our “best” interest….

In the meantime, California will burn, every summer, and American people will starve, and be homeless….

WTF?

Worked with a guy thirty years ago in New England. He grew up in San Jose, CA. He told me where his parent’s house was in San Jose, I was on a business trip in 1995 and drove by the house, it was on a corner down the street from Microsoft, there was sign “For Sale $2.5 million” for a two bedrooms on less than eight thousand square foot lot.

I think his parents sold it because of taxes.

@MrGrimm888 I disagree with almost every statement you make.

1.Taxes are essentially designed to pay for any country, to provide essential services. Incorrect. Taxes are imposed at the legislature’s will, with, or in some cases without, the Governor’s agreement. Sometimes taxes serve a useful purpose for the whole community. Most times they are more targeted.

2. A lot of that money, goes to other countries. In large part, to allow America to have some level of power, over that place. Incorrect. Of the total federal taxes collected about half goes for social security and health care. A substantial chunk goes to defense and interest. None of the state tax collected goes to foreign countries.

3. It seems ridiculous, to me, that we have SO many homeless people, when we could help them. Handouts are not a sustainable way of solving problems.

So the question sits there. Does the growing homeless problem have anything to do with government policies? There has always been a skid row aspect to our cities, defined by folks with drug or alcohol problems, mental illness, etc. What is our collective obligation to those who for whatever reason are homeless. To say that homelessness is some sort of fad or club that’s sweeping the nation—that just doesn’t ring true. What’s worse is the fact that for every homeless person you see out in the open, it sets you to wondering how many others are managing to conceal their situation through the expedient of living in their vehicles, hiding in parks, etc. Back when I was young, there was a man with whom I would play chess in a coffee house. He was always scruffy, but would wipe the floor with me (and everyone else). We called him doc, and bought him sandwiches, danish, coffee, etc. He spent his days in that coffee shop. No one knew where he was at night. But I will always remember him telling me that the down and out were like bugs—meaning that when they start appearing in annoying numbers, the infestation is already far beyond what is visible. And Doc was right. In this town, the homeless (like bugs) are more often than not hiding unseen in obscure places comprising a city’s infrastructure. They hide for the same reasons as the bugs, and by the time you see tents spilling out on the sidewalks, you know the numbers must be extreme. I admit that it requires a great deal of self control not to react in the same manner as when confronted by a colony of bugs, but for God’s sake THEY’RE PEOPLE. And I believe we have an obligation to do more than simply adapt to their presence, or hide them from view.

@stanleybmanly I watched a documentary about San Fran and it said there’s been a homeless issue since the 60’s.

Obviously I don’t know the issues there, but I know a lot of our homeless I’ve interviewed/ talked with say they are terrified of freezing to death in our winters. Maybe that makes Cali a good place due to the consistent mild climate? It’s a legitimate fear as we find frozen ones every year, even with warming centers and a ton of citizens and churches trying to keep them warm.

Local government clears out the homeless camps here until they finally move, as most are on private property. Several camps are in the woods closest to the city.

Each one has a different story. Maybe one was in a war and doesn’t feel safe indoors anywhere. One guy named Willie said he’d almost drowned in a bath tub as a child and refused to bathe at all now, so he lived in a cardboard camp. Doesn’t mean they aren’t good people, they just choose a different lifestyle. Willie told me he just wanted to be left alone and didn’t need help, this was his idea of happiness, but I could buy him a beer. It interests me greatly.

Of course you’re right. When I lived in Chicago the Winters were defined in severity by the frozen wino counts in the mornings. There have always been homeless people, but the 80s saw this huge explosion. Of course if you must be homeless and have the means to achieve it, you will seek a mild climate, and a location where local policies don’t call for your extermination. We bitch here, but we put up with our homeless, which the counties and silicon valley towns adjoining us certainly do not.

@stanleybmanly @KNOWITALL If you have two people with similar incomes, and one chooses to be homeless while the other one struggles to pay the rent every month, but somehow manages, is that the fault of government policy? Is government in a capitalist country required to provide housing and other essentials to all the inhabitants? I think not.

Taxes can be raised as long as citizens allow it, However, California doesn’t even make the top ten on Least Tax Friendly States. Look it up.

@YARNLADY Your post surprised me so much that I did google “least Friendly Tax States”

That led me to the following website:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-the-least-tax-friendly-state-in-america-and-california-doesnt-even-crack-the-top-10-2019-10-02

which does indeed not list California in the top ten of least friendly tax states. Then I looked at their methodology. They did the following:

“To draw its conclusions, it used a hypothetical couple with two kids and $150,000 in income a year plus $10,000 in dividend income, and then looked at the income-, property- and sales-tax burden that family would face.”

So, if you fit that profile, the analysis works for you. Otherwise:

”(Of course, it’s important to point out that this Kiplinger’s ranking would look different if the hypothetical family and its income and dividends were different.)”

@crazyguy Consider for a moment the idea of 2 individuals of similar incomes. The idea that one of them struggles to keep a roof over his head does not permit you to assume that the one without the roof CHOSE not to struggle. In fact, the logical assumption would be that roofless LOST the struggle. I am willing to entertain the idea that there are those with jobs who might prefer to drink or shoot heroin rather than pay rent, but the problem with that line of thought is that I don’t believe it accurately reflects the homeless situation NOW. Rather than people choosing to be homeless, the reality is surely that those struggling to maintain that roof live so closely to the edge that the slightest of misfortunes is sufficient to topple them from under that roof.