California has the highest income tax only if you earn a lot. For most earners it definitely is not the highest income tax state.
Median household income is $84 K in California. The tax rate is only 6%. And in reality it's less due to having more deductions. Contrast with Oregon where the tax rate is almost 9% for anything over 10K.
California ranks 9th for overall tax burden.
And property tax is ridiculously low, although that is offset by the high property values.
As a random data point: In my state, I got zero tax benefit for having a kid - and my household income is under $200K. I'm too "rich". I haven't checked, but I'm sure in California I'd get some deduction for the kid.
Sure, tax burden rankings usually aggregate state and local taxes.
> California cities top the charts for sales tax.
The maximum combined local sales tax rate in California is 3% (There's a 7.25% state rate, on which local district rates can be added to a maximum of 10.25%).
No California cities are in the top 50 for sales tax in the US. [0]
> A lot of these overall tax burden rankings miss that!
It is certainly possible that some might, and its always important to check the methodology, but of those with disclosed methodology, I can't recall encountering the problem.
Nationwide (as of 2021), three out of five of the cities with the highest effective sales taxes are in California. Californian cities are very much over-represented on this list.
I was wondering why there was a marked difference between the latter list which has 3 CA cities in the top five, and that of the parent post which excludes California from the top 50 taxed cities. And it seems that 0) the latter list only counts cities over 200K population, plus 1) the former list counts the Special Tax districts within Missouri cities as separate cities, so e.g. St. Louis city/county by itself counts as 13 entries in the Top 50 taxed "cities."
Median household income is $84 K in California. The tax rate is only 6%. And in reality it's less due to having more deductions. Contrast with Oregon where the tax rate is almost 9% for anything over 10K.
California ranks 9th for overall tax burden.
And property tax is ridiculously low, although that is offset by the high property values.
As a random data point: In my state, I got zero tax benefit for having a kid - and my household income is under $200K. I'm too "rich". I haven't checked, but I'm sure in California I'd get some deduction for the kid.