Tax Comparison

To the Editor:

In last Friday’s paper, Mr. Noak mentioned that in California, someone making $70,000 annually would pay over $11,000 in state income taxes. Now, this didn’t pass the smell test for me as this would be a significantly higher tax rate than even federal income tax.

So, I actually did some investigation and in about three minutes I found Mr. Noak’s statement (“you will pay $11,221 in state income taxes”) to be verifiably incorrect ( https://webapp.ftb.ca.gov/taxcalc/).

In Texas (or California or any other state, all numbers annually), the actual federal taxes paid would be closer to $13,015 (2022): $7,660.50 Federal taxes, $4,340 Social Security, and $1,015 for Medicare. State income tax in California would be $2,660 and SDI (state disability) would be $648 for a total of $3,308. A far cry from the noted $11,000-plus.

Taking into account only state-income tax and property taxes (using your average property tax numbers), the average Californian pays only about $667 more per year than a similar Texan. Also worth noting, the average property valuations in California tend to be about 70% higher than in Texas and incomes tend to be about 15% higher than similar roles in Texas.

According to a study done by the Institute of Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP - a moderate, highly reliable source, https:itep.org/whopays/) in 2018, they found that low and middle income workers in Texas tend to pay a higher percentage of their income to taxes than similar workers in California.

It wasn’t until you amassed an annual income of over $550K that the tax burden was higher in California.

This is one of those instances where someone cherry- picks the data to meet their predisposed position.