LA Times Columnist Perturbed Californians Reject Higher Taxes
Californians just used the democratic process to vote down a series of proposals that would have raised taxes in certain areas. Proponents, namely Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, argued those increases would cure the state’s budget deficit woes.
But the propositions’ defeat upset Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik who criticized Schwarzenegger for not successfully convincing voters to raise taxes
Hiltzik wrote in his May 21 column that the notion
“The most onerous lie is that Californians are burdened by
the highest state taxes in the nation,” Hiltzik wrote. “The truth, according to
2006 figures derived from the U.S. Census, is that as a percentage of all personal income,
However, as the Heritage Foundation’s blog The Foundry
observed, the tax burden is a little more complex than Hiltzik let on. Conn Carroll said in a May 21 post the deficit problem in
In other taxing categories,
- Corporate Taxes -
So if low taxes are not to blame for
Hiltzik also claimed higher taxes would not scare away investment in the state because the wealthiest don’t actually pay their “fair share.”
“Then there's the canard that we unfairly soak our rich. This is supposedly a
no-no, because the rich might flee, taking with them their sterling
job-creating potential,” Hiltzik wrote. “The dirty little secret, according to
Citizens for Tax Justice, a left-leaning nonprofit group, is that
There is evidence that contradicts Hiltzik on that point and
suggests that
“Updating some research from Richard Vedder of Ohio University, we found that from 1998 to 2007, more than 1,100 people every day including Sundays and holidays moved from the nine highest income-tax states such as California, New Jersey, New York and Ohio and relocated mostly to the nine tax-haven states with no income tax, including Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire and Texas,” Laffer and Moore wrote. “We also found that over these same years the no-income tax states created 89% more jobs and had 32% faster personal income growth than their high-tax counterparts.”
