You are preaching to the chior on prop 13.
Also, pointing to corporate taxes and graphing them is something of a red herring. Corporate taxes are not intended to represent the entire benefit to society that Corps provide, after all GAAP is not even the sole metric most investors use for evaluating corporate performance.
When California built all those roads and infrastructure to support Silicon Valley (at taxpayers expense)- it did so because it was assumed that job growth would follow, therefore paying for infrastructure improvements and then some. Corporate taxes could never support this state or any other state in the US that I know of (maybe Alaska), because at only 5% of overall state expenditures, there are barely enough funds to cover transportation, an expenditure which mostly benefits corporate interests vs. personal.
lao.ca.gov
1994, CA GSP: 879,041
2001, CA GSP: 1,359,265
dof.ca.gov
A 54% increase in California GSP in 8 years.
But overall tax revenues are DOWN.
You really can't blame prop 13 for this, because real estate did not decline from the 1994 period (prop 13 ensures that taxes will not RISE but it does not degrade tax dollars from one period to the next). This is the same argument you use to say that CA corps are not "freeloaders".
Conclusion:
- corporate taxes in the US are artificially low because it is assumed personal income tax from employment will make up the difference
- companies especially in California negotiated "sweetheart deals" in the 90s on the premise of large job growth
- the technology boom is back, with 7% GDP and no local jobs have been added, therefore companies have renigged on their part of the "deal"
California and other states have a choice to make
- Raise corporate taxes to higher levels so that we collect more than a measly 5% of total state expenditures
- Add professional jobs IN THE USA
Otherwise, we are on the never ending treadmill of too little revenues.
BTW todays GDP figure of 7% coupled with jobless claims of 388K IS TERRIBLE. |
