France has taxes around 45% of GDP, California has (including all levels, including federal) around 30%, the US as a whole (again, counting all levels) is around 25%. California is one of the higher overall tax jurisdictions in the US, but unless your argument is that the US as a whole has unreasonably low taxes, I don't get how you can say California makes France look reasonable.
Yeah, let's just say my household income is in the top 10% in the state, so no.
> or are just being cussed.
If by “being cussed” you mean “understand the difference between total tax rates and top end marginal income tax rates in a progressive tax system”, then, yes it must be this one.
If not, you've missed at least one important possibility.
> The US top end tax rate is 37%, plus California is .... what? 13? You're already up to giving away half of what you make in California.
If you make enough in regular income that essentially all of your income is taxed at the maximum marginal federal and state, sure.
But virtually no one does that , one, because, first, you have to make a huge amount of income for that to be the case, and, second, if you make enough income for that to be the case, you probably have plenty of opportunity to structure how you make income so that, again, it's not. (Of course, while France’s top marginal income tax rate is “only” 45%, it makes a lot more of it's revenue from non-regular-income taxes than anyplace in the US, with a 20% standard VAT rate and a 42.2% top tax rate, including surtaxes and social charges, on capital gains.)
> Meanwhile you have to pay taxes on physical property like your house, and your house is valued at 7 figures if you live in the Bay Area
You don't have to pay full-value on the house except in the year you bought it, assuming market appreciation of > 2%/annum because prop 13.
> Finally, there was a VAT the last time I lived there
There has never been a VAT in any part of California. There is a sales tax, which is not a VAT, which is not a VAT, and the maximum sales tax rate in the state is 10.25%.
Oof! Please don't post to HN like you did in this thread. Most of your comments are great but we just can't have this kind of thing here—we're trying against the odds to have HN hover a little above internet median and this kind of thing just sinks us. It isn't only the damage the specific posts cause—it's what it invites from others. I recently wrote a longer explanation of why we moderate this way, if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25130956
There are other HN users with fire-breathing powers and formidable writing skills whom we eventually persuaded not to post in the enemy-incinerating style here. The argument boils down to trying to have a site that remains at least moderately interesting. There exist communities in which members kick the shit out of each other (or let's be nice, out of opposing arguments) and are higher-quality for it. I like to compare this to rugby teams who beat each other up and then go out drinking together: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
HN can't work this way because it's much too big and incohesive—the average quality of contribution is much lower, and there are no relational ties to mitigate the downside. If people start posting in that style here, a copycat stampede will result, only without any insight or wit. We'll end up with mass battles on scorched earth, which is interesting to none of the users that we actually want to have here. Trying to stave off that fate for as long as possible is actually the founding idea behind HN:
> The rest of it: I'll let you have the fact that the VAT in California is called "sales tax"
No, the sales tax is called sales tax. VAT and sales tax are structurally different.
> it's the highest in the US, FWIIW.
That's true if you talk exclusively of the state-only rate, which makes no sense to use as the basis of comparison; for statewide average combined state and local sales tax rate (the average rate people actually pay for sales tax in the State), California is #9, behind liberal utopias like Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Alabama, among others. (Not only is California not the highest for average combined state and local sales tax, it's nowhere close to the highest for peak combined state and local sales tax, that is, the maximum people actually have to pay; the source I have doesn't rank this way, but from inspection it looks like Illinois with a statewide 6.25% and a peak local additional of 10.00% is the top there.)
