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California Dims are going tax crazy

IndySteel

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They're going to tax drinking water, soda, tires... That 12 ounce Coke from the vending machine will increase by $2.40

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/california-goes-tax-wild-eyes-levies-on-everything-from-water-to-tires

iu
 
The sad thing is all those taxes go AGAINST the so-called basis of democrat taxation that the "rich should pay more". Taxes on gas, sugary drinks, tires, et. al, will disproportionately effect people in the bottom half of income levels. By a lot. The massive inflation in CA - the inability to buy a home, the cost of day-to-day items, cost/congestion of driving - all effect working class people of California as a huge burden while to the wealthy and top 1% only offers a mild inconvenience.

It just makes no sense and I don't understand why democrats call out their legislators on the hypocrisy of saying the rich should pay more yet continuing to support sales and use taxes that so effect the working poor.

As with most democratic policies, there is no logic or fairness. All they want is bigger government, more control and more poor people under their thumb.
 
Just wait....soon they will be taxing solar power.
 
I guess ammunition sales in neighboring states have skyrocketed?

California already has some of the toughest gun control laws in the country and, beginning in 2019, state ammunition dealers will be required to maintain logs of all sales – including those of bullets. The state has already restricted online sales of bullets so they can only be delivered to licensed dealers and not someone’s home.
 
**** that state. I hope I never have to set foot in it again. Absolutely mind ******.
 
They're going to tax drinking water, soda, tires...

They really don't have a choice Indy. The State has a massive pile of debt and no real plan to pay it off any time soon.

I struggled to get real time numbers but by all known resources, as of 2015 at least, the debt is between $848 billion and $1.1 trillion.

We estimate that California state and local governments owe $1.3 trillion as of June 30, 2015. Our analysis is based on a review of federal, state and local financial disclosures. The total includes bonds, loans and other debt instruments as well as unfunded pension and other post-employment benefits promised to public sector employees. Our estimate of California government debt represents about 52% of California’s Gross State Product of $2.48 trillion. When added to the state’s share of the national debt, we find that California taxpayers are shouldering debt burdens on a par with residents of peripheral Eurozone states.
https://californiapolicycenter.org/californias-total-state-local-debt-totals-1-3-trillion/

california-the-liberal-socialist-utopia-high-gas-prices-water-problems-22424191.png
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But they do have the weather, it's just expensive.

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California used to be a wonderful place. We lived in SF for 7 years in the 70s. Have been back many times since. Noticed a great change in the 80s - there was a pall of materialism hanging over everything. That seemed to morph into a strange blend of materialism and leftism in the 90s. Since then they have just gone off the cliff. Its an insane asylum of 40 million people, 25 million of which are barking lunatics. This after a century, all but 25 years, of Republican governance. But the Browns were the virus that killed that wonderful land. We left because we were referred to as "breeders". In the 70s. The left are so lovingly 'tolerant'.

Victor Davis Hanson is (I think) 4th gen Californian, and one of the few remaining sane. He's an historian at the Hoover institution...

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/california-has-become-americas-cannibal-state/
California Has Become America's Cannibal State
By Victor Davis Hanson | April 10, 2019

For over six years, California has had a top marginal income tax rate of 13.3 percent, the highest in the nation. About 150,000 households in a state of 40 million people now pay nearly half of the total annual state income tax.

The state legislature sold that confiscatory tax rate on the idea that it was a temporary fix and would eventually be phased out. No one believed that. California voters, about 40 percent of whom pay no state income taxes, naturally approved the extension of the high rate by an overwhelming margin.

California recently raised gas taxes by 40 percent and now has the second-highest gas taxes in the United States.

California has the ninth-highest combined state and local sales taxes in the country, but its state sales tax of 7.3 percent is America's highest. As of April 1, California is now applying that high state sales tax to goods that residents buy online from out-of-state sellers.

In late 2017, the federal government capped state and local tax deductions at $10,000. For high earners in California, the change effectively almost doubled their state and local taxes.

Such high taxes, often targeting a small percentage of the population, may have brought California a budget surplus of more than $20 million. Yet California is never satiated with high new tax rates that bring in additional revenue. It's always hungry for more.

Scott Wiener, a Democratic state senator from San Francisco, has introduced a bill that would create a new California estate tax. Wiener outlined a death tax of 40 percent on estates worth more than $3.5 million for single Californians or more than $7 million for married couples.

Given the soaring valuations of California properties, a new estate tax could force children to sell homes or family farms they inherited just to pay the tax bills.

Soon, even more of the Californian taxpayers who chip in to pay half of the state income taxes will flee in droves for low-tax or no-tax states.

What really irks California taxpayers are the shoddy public services that they receive in exchange for such burdensome taxes. California can be found near the bottom of state rankings for schools and infrastructure.

San Francisco ranks first among America's largest cities in property crimes per capita. The massive concrete ruins of the state's quarter-built and now either canceled or postponed multibillion-dollar high-speed rail system are already collecting graffiti.

Roughly a quarter of the nation's homeless live in California. So do about one-third of all Americans on public assistance. Approximately one-fifth of the state's population lives below the poverty line. About one-third of Californians are enrolled in Medi-Cal, the state's health care program for low-income residents.

California's social programs are magnets that draw in the indigent from all over the world, who arrive in search of generous health, education, legal, nutritional and housing subsidies. Some 27 percent of the state's residents were not born in the United States.
Last month alone, nearly 100,000 foreign nationals were stopped at the southern border, according to officials. Huge numbers of migrants are able to make it across without being caught, and many end up in California.

A lot of upper-middle-class taxpayers feel that not only does California fail to appreciate their contributions, but that the state often blames them for not paying even more -- as if paying about half of their incomes to local, state and federal governments somehow reveals their greed.

The hyper-wealthy liberal denizens of Hollywood, Silicon Valley and the coastal enclaves often seem exempt from the consequences of the high taxes they so often advocate for others. The super-rich either have the clout to hire experts to help them avoid such taxes, or they simply have so much money that they are not much affected by even California's high taxes.

What is the ideology behind such destructive state policies?

Venezuela, which is driving out its middle class, is apparently California's model. Venezuelan leaders believed in providing vast subsidies for the poor. The country's super-rich are often crony capitalists who can avoid high taxes.

Similarly, California is waging an outright war on the upper-middle class, which lacks the numbers of the poor and the clout of the rich.

Those who administer California's plagued department of motor vehicles and high-speed rail authority may often be inept and dysfunctional, but the state's tax collectors are the most obsessive bureaucrats in the nation.

What is Sacramento's message to those who combine to pay half the state's income taxes and have not yet left California?

"Be gone or we will eat you!"
 
I have it on good authority that the rest of America may not survive without CA....
 
Also read this morning that the great state of NY just passed $27 million in new spending to send illegal immigrants to college, but wouldn't expand beyond $2.7 million to send gold star children to school. That's ****** up, IMHO.
 
I mean, I get it. We are supposed to be compassionate nation. I just don't understand how one damn nickel gets spent on illegal immigrants ahead of the citizenry. I don't.
 
I mean, I get it. We are supposed to be compassionate nation. I just don't understand how one damn nickel gets spent on illegal immigrants ahead of the citizenry. I don't.

It isn't about 'compassion'. It has NOTHING to do with 'compassion'. Zero. That's just sloganeering for the numbskulls that push this descent into madness. It's the Cloward - Piven strategy. It's about destroying the Republic. You can't fight an enemy if you don't understand it.

This from 5 years ago...

http://humanevents.com/2014/06/09/cloward-piven-at-the-border/
Cloward-Piven at the border
John Hayward | Monday Jun 9, 2014 9:03 AM

Back in the Sixties, Marxists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven came up with a great strategy for overloading and collapsing democratic welfare states, paving the way for socialist tyranny. Basically, the idea was to hit the system with a tidal wave of demands it couldn’t refuse, and couldn’t possibly fulfill. The Left would then insist that the moral argument for the system remained intact, so the only way to meet those impossible demands was to scrap every vestige of Constitutional restraint and republican self-government, instituting a totalitarian system that in theory would forcibly restructure society to promote “fairness” and give all those government dependents what they “deserve.” (In practice, of course, what you actually get is an iron-fisted dictatorship that cooks up reports to make itself look good, or simply tells the unhappy citizens to shut up and obey when things deteriorate to the point that no volume of phony reports can paper over the problems – say, when the glorious worker’s paradise of Venezuela runs out of tap water.)

Cloward and Piven were specifically interested in replacing welfare programs with a government-guaranteed annual income for everyone – an idea that still emerges from the more absurd quarters of the Left occasionally – but the basic idea of overloading the republican system and replacing it with centrally-planned tyranny can be applied in many different ways. Take a look at the humanitarian crisis on the southern border, which I wrote about two weeks ago. It has since burst onto the front pages with some astonishing stories, including leaked photos of illegal alien children – many of them 12 years old and younger – “warehoused” in overcrowded facilities, where there are growing concerns about sanitation and disease. CBS News in Houston writes of unaccompanied minors sleeping on plastic boards in a Nogales, Arizona warehouse after being flown in from south Texas. According to some estimates, there are nearly a thousand children in that warehouse now.

There’s nothing complicated about what is happening here. Barack Obama invited these people to send their children to the United States as refugees. He’s already made illegal use of executive orders to gut the immigration system; he’s talking about doing it again, and the people of South and Central America can hear him just fine. There have been anecdotal reports of a message being spread throughout Central American countries, by everything from word-of-mouth gossip to news media: “Go to America with your child, you won’t be turned away.” (It will come as no surprise to learn that the Mexican government is not doing much to halt the train of amnesty-seekers headed for American soil. On the contrary, corrupt Mexican officials are trying to get a cut of the profits from the refugee-smuggling trade.)

And it’s not just the President sending those signals, since there’s a vibrant bipartisan amnesty chorus in Congress. Obama will only seize power to rewrite the laws if Congress doesn’t do it fast enough for his taste, or if he sees electoral advantage in taking matters into his own hands.

Young illegals are particularly cherished by the American ruling class, which has dubbed them “Dreamers” and frankly describes them as superior in motivation and potential to native-born young people. There is every reason for families who live in South America to think their children will be given citizenship, plus special perks (such as access to discounted college tuition rates) if they can get them to the U.S. border. The Obama Administration is even talking about providing the young illegals with attorneys. The Federal Emergency Management Agency has become involved at President Obama’s direction.

This tidal wave of illegals is not an accident, and not entirely a result of conditions in Central America (which have deteriorated lately, but were already bad enough to inspire any sane person to seek a new life elsewhere.) These people were summoned. And now that they’re here, the system is collapsing beneath their weight. In addition to the refugees flown to Arizona in the CBS News story above, the El Paso Times reports two planeloads of illegals arriving for processing. “The vast majority of individuals transferred were family units from Central America and Mexico with children,” according to an El Paso official.

Contrary to popular mythology about President Obama being some sort of deportation hard-liner, the truth is that most of his “deportations” were actually catch-and-release scenarios played out at the border – people who were essentially repulsed rather than caught and deported. Such people were not counted as “deportations” in the past – remember what I said about the government cooking the books to make itself look better? Well, catch-and-release only works when the illegal aliens in question come from Mexico. There’s no practical method for sending the wave of families and unaccompanied minors surging in from Central America back to their homes. They’re most likely here to stay. And even though the Obama Administration had every reason to know they were coming, the immigration system was curiously unprepared to deal with them. Cloward-Piven tactics work even better when the system is hollowed out and made ready for speedy collapse.

Does the amnesty chorus recoil from this humanitarian crisis in shame and ask, “My God, what have we done?” Do they accept this stunning proof of a point often raised by amnesty critics: lax border security and indulgence of illegal immigration causes the flood of illegal aliens – rational people who respond to incentives – to intensify? Of course not. They’re using the horror they have created as leverage to get amnesty moving even faster. Here’s GOP Majority Leader Eric Cantor talking with the White House over the weekend about making a deal, from the Daily Caller:

“I have told the president, there are some things we can work on together,” he said in the WTVR interview.

“We can work on the border security bill together, we can work on something like the kids,” he said referring to his proposal to offer some undetermined variety of amnesty to the children and youths of millions of parents who entered the country illegally.
“So far, the president has just insisted that it’s all or nothing, [it is] my way or the highway,” Cantor complained. “That’s not going to happen,” he added.

But President Barack Obama is willing to make a deal, says one White House advisor, Rev. Richard Ryscavage.

Ryscavage is a Jesuit priest, a sociology and anthropology professor at Fairfield University, the director of the university’s Center for Faith and Public Life, and a member of a new White House panel on immigration.

A compromise is “what they’re preparing for, that’s what they think is going to happen, so they’re[publicly] asking for a lot of stuff that privately they don’t think they’re going to get” in a final deal, he told The Daily Caller June 6.

So they’re specifically portraying the very same incentives that brought the flood of minors to our border as a point of agreement from which a deal can be built. And note Rev. Ryscavage’s portrayal of many amnesty demands as part of a bidding process designed to wear down those who take citizenship and border security seriously. The White House is “asking for a lot of stuff that privately they don’t think they’re going to get,” so when they get what they really wanted all along, it’ll be portrayed as a bipartisan compromise, opposed only by extremists. They won’t be shy about pointing to the very humanitarian crisis they have deliberately created to argue that their demands must be immediately met – a tactic that will further exhaust resistance from those who are already weary of being slandered as cruel xenophobes, and holding the line against an amnesty demand the Beltway-media complex portrays as inevitable.

Soon we’ll have millions of new citizens placing heavy demands on our maternal government, with hundreds of thousands more streaming in every year, eager to claim the prizes that have been offered to them. The governments that mismanage the nations from which these poor souls are fleeing will feel even less pressure to make things better – they’re happy to use the United States as a dumping ground for excess population. The Cloward-Piven effect will spread inward from the border, and outward into every aspect of our centralized system. If you think the bleating about “income inequality” is bad now, wait until you hear what it sounds like after a few years of tidal-wave migration – especially if it’s combined with minimum-wage hikes that make it difficult to hire the new arrivals, and a regulatory morass that makes it hard to launch or expand businesses that might hire them. And you won’t have to wait long for ObamaCare’s planned collapse into ruin, paving the way for single-payer health care.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) had it exactly right, in an interview he granted to Breitbart Texas:

“We need a president who is willing to uphold the law,” Cruz said. “On issue after issue the Obama Administration has openly ignored, defied, and unilaterally tried to change the law. With respect to securing the border, the Obama Administration has handcuffed the courageous men and women who serve in Border Patrol. Morale in ICE is at an all-time low because the political operatives leading this Administration are preventing them from doing their job and upholding the law.”

He continued, “Just a few months before the last election the president illegally and unconstitutionally granted amnesty to some 800,000 people illegally. If the president wants to change federal immigration laws, the Constitution lays out a way to do so–you go and make your case to Congress and you convince Congress to change the laws…unfortunately for President Obama, following the Constitutional structure is apparently too cumbersome. One of the consequences were seeing on the border is a humanitarian crisis that is a direct consequence of Obama’s lawlessness.”

What’s happening on our southern border right now is horrifying, but it’s not unexpected. The people who caused it will never feel an instant of remorse for what they’ve done. And they’ll grow increasingly less interested in what the legal citizens of the United States have to say about immigration policy. What’s your plan for dealing with the thousands of unaccompanied minors who are being shipped to our doorstep?

Update: Another thought that occurred to me while discussing this post with Jim Vicevich on the radio this morning: if the Administration had taken steps to prepare for the wave of refugees it knew was coming – and make no mistake, it knew, because if nothing else, we have a national-security apparatus that monitors such things – they would have looked really bad at a crucial moment in last year’s immigration debate. “Hey, why are you guys building huge refugee centers in south Texas…?”

But this way, the situation is dropped in our laps as a done deal, a fait accompli. They’re here, they can’t be deported, there’s nothing we can do except give the amnesty chorus at least part of what it wants. Turning this into a deliberate humanitarian crisis was a political power play. Imagine the tenor of our “national conversation” on immigration if the Administration had forthrightly informed the American people that hundreds of thousands of unaccompanied minors were being flung at the border, obliging the government to spend millions preparing to receive them… and it was largely happening because their parents had every reason to believe they would be well-received.

Update: Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer responded angrily to these Cloward-Piven tactics, as the feds begin dumping illegal immigrants from Texas into her state without warning her first. When she complained, the feds said they have no intention of stopping.

Fox News: “Federal officials told Brewer Friday that the practice will continue for the foreseeable future, and this weekend more than 1,000 illegal immigrant children will be “dumped” in Arizona. Adults and family units will also arrive, though Brewer was not told how many, her office said.”

“This is a crisis of the federal government’s creation, and the fact that the border remains unsecure – now apparently intentionally – while this operation continues full-steam ahead is deplorable,” said Brewer. Exactly, Governor. Just wait until you’re told you must comply with various Washington directives in order to receive federal assistance for the man-made humanitarian crisis that just got dumped in Arizona’s lap.
 
If California just lets in another 6,000,000 illegals, all will be solved.

California already has some of the toughest gun control laws in the country and, beginning in 2019, state ammunition dealers will be required to maintain logs of all sales – including those of bullets. The state has already restricted online sales of bullets so they can only be delivered to licensed dealers and not someone’s home.

Guess who moved out of California about five months ago? And hey, guess who just had 1,000 rounds of 124 grain 9mm delivered TO HIS ******* HOME?!?!?
 
In other news....Oregon is getting set to pass a bill to add an additional $2 a pack cigarette tax. It's going to help pay off their Medicaid bill. That's going to make a lot of people on Medicaid upset.
 
In other news....Oregon is getting set to pass a bill to add an additional $2 a pack cigarette tax. It's going to help pay off their Medicaid bill. That's going to make a lot of people on Medicaid upset.

Taxes pay for "free" medical care for the poor ... uhh, "productivity challenged citizens" on Medicaid. Those on Medicaid smoke at a vastly greater percentage than the non-Medicaid population. So the "free" medical care is now paid for by the poor ... uhhh,"income non-equivalent citizens" via cigarette tax, so the poor ... uhh, the ... **** it, the poor are now actually going to have to pay for something by way of a tax on the very thing that triggers a lot of the need for medical care??

catch-22.gif
 
No, I think we are a compassionate nation. It is why we allow legal immigration. It is why Americans consistently give more money to charity than any other nation. But we are also a nation of laws. At least that is what my government tells me, even as they pick and choose which laws they will enforce and on whom those laws will be enforced.

I understand what is going on at the border and within the Democrat party in regards to immigration. It is patently obvious. What I also understand is that the Republicans and the President himself are complicit in what it has turned into through inaction. Sure, the President is doing something NOW. Trying to do something in 2017 and most of 2018 would have worked better.
 
I don’t understand how y’all expected him to fix it then. He was fighting enemies with D and R behind there name until the last year. Now most Republicans are on board with his policies. They wasted a great chance 2 years ago. Look at the list of Republican ******** that fought him toothe and nail.. McCain,Lee, Flake and more.
 
I don't know what more Trump could have. done. Every time he does move on the border the Libs run to the courts and stop him. The congress should have taken care of this long before now. But they don't because they are all fine with giving the country away to people that will turn it into Mexico North.
 
Taxes pay for "free" medical care for the poor ... uhh, "productivity challenged citizens" on Medicaid. Those on Medicaid smoke at a vastly greater percentage than the non-Medicaid population. So the "free" medical care is now paid for by the poor ... uhhh,"income non-equivalent citizens" via cigarette tax, so the poor ... uhh, the ... **** it, the poor are now actually going to have to pay for something by way of a tax on the very thing that triggers a lot of the need for medical care??

Also blacks smoke at a much higher rate than whites, therefore cigarette taxes are racist.
 
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