Some years ago I had to deal with California income tax for various reasons. I think at that time you had to earn over 50K to hit 9% marginal. In my state you hit that at about 16K. And this is after deductions where California had a ton more. I believe one needed an income of over 100K before the amount they paid in taxes exceeded that of my state.
Median household income is $84 K in California. The tax rate is only 6%. And in reality it's less due to having more deductions. Contrast with Oregon where the tax rate is almost 9% for anything over 10K.
California ranks 9th for overall tax burden.
And property tax is ridiculously low, although that is offset by the high property values.
As a random data point: In my state, I got zero tax benefit for having a kid - and my household income is under $200K. I'm too "rich". I haven't checked, but I'm sure in California I'd get some deduction for the kid.
Sure, tax burden rankings usually aggregate state and local taxes.
> California cities top the charts for sales tax.
The maximum combined local sales tax rate in California is 3% (There's a 7.25% state rate, on which local district rates can be added to a maximum of 10.25%).
No California cities are in the top 50 for sales tax in the US. [0]
> A lot of these overall tax burden rankings miss that!
It is certainly possible that some might, and its always important to check the methodology, but of those with disclosed methodology, I can't recall encountering the problem.
[0] https://www.salestaxhandbook.com/highest-salestax-cities
Nationwide (as of 2021), three out of five of the cities with the highest effective sales taxes are in California. Californian cities are very much over-represented on this list.
https://taxfoundation.org/sales-tax-rates-by-city-2021/#High...