My solution is for the corporate freeloaders to leave ... I pay 5x the taxes I did in 94. Corps must pay LESS. Amazing.
That's a nice slogan. Corporations aren't human; they're easy to hate. But you could easily look up the facts and find out that what you said isn't true.
Here are spreadsheets for California state revenues since the 1950's. In the upper right hand corner it will default to General Fund. I suggest clicking "(All)" in that box to get a more complete story about where California's money comes from and has come from over time:
lao.ca.gov
I also suggest bookmarking this link for discussion of the issue of California's tax structure.
California, partly I think due to the legacy of Prop 13 and the high property values (esp. near the coast), has long relied on a tax structure with very low property taxes and very high income taxes. A good basis for comparison is Illinois, which I am familiar with because I live there. Illinois has a flat 3 percent income tax and in places an extremely high property taxes. For example, where I live a home worth $500,000 is assessed annual property taxes of more than $11,000.
The result of this approach is that in California if you make a high income you will pay a LOT of taxes. If you make a high income in Illinois you won't pay any larger proportion than you would at a low income level, but if you buy an expensive house your property taxes (depending on the locale) can be very high.
Back to California. It simply isn't the case that California corporations are "freeloaders", for a couple of reasons. First, let's trace the history of California state tax receipts from the Corporation Tax. If corporations are "freeloaders", one would expect those tax receipts to be trending downward.
But they aren't. Here are the actual numbers:
Corporation Tax (Fiscal year ending ... , in thousands)
1951: 98,245
1952: 120,127
1953: 119,127
1954: 125,026
1955: 133,661
1956: 157,088
1957: 167,431
1958: 173,599
1959: 174,003
1960: 240,735
1961: 272,718
1962: 290,870
1963: 311,251
1964: 405,431
1965: 416,247
1966: 435,597
1967: 453,292
1968: 576,874
1969: 592,303
1970: 587,013
1971: 532,091
1972: 662,522
1973: 866,117
1974: 1,057,191
1975: 1,253,673
1976: 1,286,515
1977: 1,641,500
1978: 2,082,208
1979: 2,381,223
1980: 2,510,039
1981: 2,730,624
1982: 2,648,735
1983: 2,536,011
1984: 3,231,281
1985: 3,664,593
1986: 3,843,024
1987: 4,800,843
1988: 4,776,388
1989: 5,138,009
1990: 4,964,842
1991: 4,545,384
1992: 4,537,964
1993: 4,777,319
1994: 4,787,474
1995: 5,716,603
1996: 5,862,327
1997: 5,788,774
1998: 5,837,426
1999: 5,724,035
2000: 6,638,762
2001: 6,899,302
2002: 5,333,036
2003: 6,700,011
2004: 7,035,011
California's revenue from the Corporation Tax has increased in 43 of the past 54 years. The average increase in the years it has gone up dwarfs the average decrease. It has increased by decade dramatically:
1951: $98,245,000
1960: $240,735,000
1970: $587,013,000
1980: $2,510,039,000
1990: $4,964,842,000
2000: $6,638,762,000
Incidentally, inflation is only a small part of the story of these increases. Using the CPI Inflation Calculator (http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl), $100 in 1951 is the equivalent of $712.31 in 2003, an increase of 712.31 percent.
If you increase the California revenue from the Corporation Tax by the rate of inflation from 1951 to 2003, the revenue level from the corporation tax would be $699,808,960 in 2003. In fact, it was $6,700,011,000, or nearly ten times as high in real terms as it was in 1951.
Paying ten times as much as you used to in real terms is not freeloading. Corporations are leaving because, far from freeloading, they are being much more heavily taxed. And corporations usually have a choice of location. I work for a company that has reduced from three California operations to one over the past decade, due in large part to the cost of doing business there versus other places in the U.S.
Incidentally, if you are paying five times as much tax as you did in 1994 it must mean you are making a significantly higher income than you were, since California's personal income tax rate structure to my knowledge has not changed significantly in that time. |
