In short, California is a wonderful place to live for Bay Area, 30-something Google executives; young, rich Stanford students; and Malibu celebrities — or recently arrived indigents fleeing the abject misery of Latin America and needing generous public help.
California now works on the principle of the mordida, or “bite.” Its government assumes that it can take something extra from residents for the privilege of living in their special state.
Governor Jerry Brown made that assumption explicit in his latest back-and-forth with Texas governor Rick Perry, who keeps luring Californians to lower-tax, higher-employment Texas. Recently, Brown said of Texas, “Who would want to spend summers there in 110-degree heat inside some kind of fossil-fuel air conditioner?”
Translated, Brown’s retort meant that despite California’s sluggish economy, high taxes, and poor services, it’s still worth staying there to enjoy its beautiful climate — especially along the 1,000-mile-long coast, where most of the state’s elites live comfortably without the need for high-priced air conditioning.
In November, California approved a measure to raise its sales tax and its income-tax rates on the wealthy. According to the California Taxpayers Association, the state now has the highest sales tax and the highest top income-tax rate in the nation. The state also just upped its gasoline taxes by nearly 10 percent to make them the costliest in the United States — about 70 cents a gallon in combined federal, state, and local taxes. The state already has among the most expensive refinery regulations in America. That means California pump prices, at well over $4 per gallon, are second only to Hawaii’s.
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