Governor Patrick Bateman meets Sparkle Beach Ken says that California is a low tax state.
Yes, really.
At an SXSW conference Sunday in Austin, Texas Sunday, Gov. Gavin Newsom had the chutzpah to argue that, actually, Texas and Florida are higher tax states than California.
“We have the most progressive tax rates in America,” Newsom said when asked about income inequality in his state. “… Texas taxes poor folks more than we tax our richest. The question for you is, who’s the higher tax state, California or Texas? Who are you for? Are you just for the 1% or are you for the 99%?”
I’ll give the California governor credit for something; he certainly does have a gift for spinning blatantly ridiculous narratives with a straight face. He’s a natural politician, really.
Unfortunately, the whole “California is actually a low tax state!” thing—as much as it flies in the face of common sense—needs to be addressed because Newsom keeps going with this message. I’m sure the legacy media will do their best to make that stick in the next few years.
In making this low taxes argument, Newsom is forgoing the more reasonable but still incorrect Democrat assertion that their higher taxes are just the cost of all those wonderful services they provide. Even this is hard to believe these days because blue cities and states are often so incompetently run and are barely hiding the reality that taxpayer money is being used to pay off various patronage groups.
No, Newsom really wants you to believe that all those Californians bailing out of the state, citing the high cost of living, are just deluded fools escaping a low tax paradise. Or perhaps they are fleeing Paradise and other towns after they burned down due to poor forest management—Er, I mean because of “global warming”—and the governor did little to help them rebuild.
As a native Californian with plenty of family still living behind the iron curtain, I can assure you that the Golden State is not a low tax haven for anyone.
Newsom is partly basing his claim on the state’s “progressive” income tax rates that hit the top 1% of income earners harder than other states like Florida and Texas. Texas and Florida don’t even have a personal income tax.
He cited the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning nonprofit, to claim that “for the bottom 40% of families, California taxes are LOWER than states like Florida and Texas.”
This assertion is both dubious and carefully calibrated to not reveal the full truth.
The Washington Examiner noted that “the only reason California’s bottom 20% of income earners do not pay a higher percentage of their income in taxes than Texas’s bottom 20% is because California uses its tax code as a welfare system.” So, while Texas’ bottom 20% “pay nothing in income taxes, California’s bottom 20% received 2% of their income from Sacramento in the form of refundable tax credits.”
Without those payments, the California bottom 20% pay more. They certainly get hit by other taxes like the highest in nation gas taxes that up the cost of driving, food, and most everything else in the state.
And middle-income earners pay quite a bit more.
Kiplinger rated the California tax burden for the middle class to be the fifth highest in the country, with middle income families “spending nearly 13% of their income on state taxes.”
Whatever one can say about the rate of individual taxes, the overall tax burden in California, a better way of evaluating taxes, is much higher than places like Florida and Texas.
As RealClearPolitics president Tom Bevan noted on X, a Wallethub 2025 analysis of tax burden by state listed California as the fourth highest. Florida and Texas were among the lowest tax burden states.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis responded to Bevan’s post, citing the absurdity of Newsom’s argument that California has lower taxes than Florida.
“Even people who like California governance acknowledge CA is a very high tax state: highest sales, income and gas taxes in the nation,” the Florida governor wrote.
California’s tax and regulatory environment have made the cost of living truly outrageous. Housing prices are sky high (thanks in part to the state’s sanctuary status). Gas prices are the highest in the country by nearly $2 a gallon thanks to the Democratic Party’s green madness.
Almost nothing in California is affordable.
Along with New York, the Golden State is the model for high taxes, low affordability, poor governance, and suicidal wokeness.
Californians on the public dole muddle through. The rich look for tax havens while enjoying the nice climate and beautiful views. The politically connected get their cut. The middle-income folks ponder whether the weather is worth the trouble. But nobody who lives in the state really believes that the main advantage they have living in California is the comparably low taxes.
Newsom can spin whatever nonsense he wants for the media, but when he says things are up, expect them to be down.
