You Pay the Highest Taxes in America. Look at What You Get for It.

Author: Greg Van Dyke, California Consumer Advocates

Californians pay the highest income taxes in the nation. The highest state sales tax. The highest gas tax. Some of the highest utility bills in America. Add it all up and you find that California has the highest cost of living in the country.

It is not just Sacramento. Over the past decade, Californians have faced more than 2,000 new and higher local taxes on top of everything the state already takes.

Taxpayers are right to ask: what are we getting for our money? The answer is not pretty.

In just three years, Sacramento politicians blew through a $100 billion surplus and left behind a deficit of more than $30 billion. Not one dollar from this spending spree made your life cheaper.

Here is where some of it went.

• $37 billion on homelessness, with no real system to track whether any of it worked — and homelessness only got worse.
• $31 billion lost to unemployment insurance fraud.
• $230 billion for a High Speed Rail system that was sold to voters at $33.5 billion.
• $1.2 billion for a secretive new Capitol office building — double what the politicians first promised.

Now that the surplus is gone, the politicians want more. In just the last two years, they proposed more than $800 billion in new taxes. These taxes would impact what you earn, what you buy, even the miles you drive.

Higher taxes will not stop the waste. They reward it. Every dollar handed over without accountability guarantees they come back asking for the next one.

California does not have a revenue problem. It has a spending problem. Stop the waste. We don’t need higher taxes.