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mat-ty
Joined: 07 Jul 2007
Posts: 7850
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 Posted: Wed May 15, 2019 1:29 pm Post subject: |
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| mac wrote: | | The last time a stupid Alabama anti-abortion law was overturned, they paid the legal bills for both the ACLU and Planned Parenthood. Get ready to pay the same lawyers again. It might be the water. Contaminated with pig shit? |
No....you're not a bigot  |
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techno900
Joined: 28 Mar 2001
Posts: 4161
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| Posted: Wed May 15, 2019 1:32 pm Post subject: |
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LHDR said: | Quote: | | techno, you often weasel your way out, but if you wish to argue that CA overpays UC employees |
Show me where I said that CA overpays UC employees. It's a judgment call, some may say they are paid too much and some may say that in CA, it's not enough. I am just sharing observations, you be the judge.
What, no comments on the "bull in a china shop"? Funding pensions for State employees? | Quote: | Last week, CalPERS told Gov. Jerry Brown and legislators that they must include $6.3 billion in the 2018-19 state budget to cover state employee pensions, making it one of the budget’s largest single items.
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It's only more taxes - That's why I call it Nutty California. |
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coachg
Joined: 10 Sep 2000
Posts: 3550
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| Posted: Wed May 15, 2019 3:00 pm Post subject: |
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Bad example. You are talking about Alabama where incest was legal far longer than interracial marriage. Just because your state may frown upon incest doesn't give you the right to pass judgement on Alabama's culture, otherwise you start encroaching on Techno's territory.
Coachg |
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swchandler
Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588
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| Posted: Wed May 15, 2019 5:13 pm Post subject: |
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"It's only more taxes - That's why I call it Nutty California."
techno900, I'll give you the truth. Yet, it's a bit of an enigma for some.
I haven't paid any state income tax for years living comfortably in Santa Barbara.
I guess it's a miracle of sorts for those sometimes looking in from afar. |
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MalibuGuru
Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9300
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| Posted: Wed May 15, 2019 7:22 pm Post subject: |
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| swchandler wrote: | "It's only more taxes - That's why I call it Nutty California."
techno900, I'll give you the truth. Yet, it's a bit of an enigma for some.
I haven't paid any state income tax for years living comfortably in Santa Barbara.
I guess it's a miracle of sorts for those sometimes looking in from afar. |
I must report you to the Gestapo in the IRS. I thought you were paying more taxes than before. |
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swchandler
Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588
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| Posted: Wed May 15, 2019 7:52 pm Post subject: |
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| I guess I'm speaking to the mirage that older folks have to abandon California because state income taxes are too high. A bit of truth is telling, despite the song from the right. |
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techno900
Joined: 28 Mar 2001
Posts: 4161
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| Posted: Fri May 17, 2019 12:44 pm Post subject: |
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swchandler said: | Quote: | | I guess I'm speaking to the mirage that older folks have to abandon California because state income taxes are too high. A bit of truth is telling, despite the song from the right. |
How can you be a Democrat and not "pay your fair share"? Actually, not taking advantage of all legal tax write offs/loop holes is stupid. I wonder where the $6.3 billion in the next Calif. budget for pensions will come from?
Not many deductions in Calif for state income tax, so how do you manage not paying? No income? |
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techno900
Joined: 28 Mar 2001
Posts: 4161
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| Posted: Wed Jun 12, 2019 8:09 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | California's rendezvous with reality - With less than 1 percent of its taxpayers paying half of the state income tax, it prays they stay put
By Victor Davis Hanson - - Wednesday, February 27, 2019
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
Californians brag that their state is the world’s fifth-largest economy. They talk as reverentially of Silicon Valley companies Apple, Facebook and Google as the ancient Greeks did of their Olympian gods.
Hollywood and universities such as Caltech, Stanford and Berkeley are cited as permanent proof of the intellectual, aesthetic and technological dominance of West Coast culture.
Californians also see their progressive, one-party state as a neo-socialist model for a nation moving hard to the left. But how long will they retain such confidence?
California’s 40 million residents depend on less than 1 percent of the state’s taxpayers to pay nearly half of the state income tax, which for California’s highest tier of earners tops out at the nation’s highest rate of 13.3 percent.
In other words, California cannot afford to lose even a few thousand of its wealthiest individual taxpayers. But a new federal tax law now caps deductions for state and local taxes at $10,000 — a radical change that promises to cost many high-earning taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars. If even a few thousand of the state’s 1 percent flee to nearby no-tax states such as Nevada or Texas, California could face a devastating shortfall in annual income.
During the 2011-16 California drought, politicians and experts claimed that global warming had permanently altered the climate, and that snow and rain would become increasingly rare in California. As a result, long-planned low-elevation reservoirs, designed to store water during exceptionally wet years, were considered all but useless and thus were never built.
Then, in 2016 and 2017, California received record snow and rainfall — and the windfall of millions of acre-feet of runoff was mostly let out to sea. Nothing since has been learned.
California has again been experiencing rain and cold that could approach seasonal records. The state has been soaked by some 18 trillion gallons of rain in February alone. With still no effort to expand California’s water-storage capacity, millions of acre-feet of runoff are once again cascading out to sea (and may be sorely missed next year).
The inability to build reservoirs is especially tragic given that the state’s high-speed-rail project has gobbled up more than $5 billion in funds without a single foot of track laid. The total cost soared from an original $40 billion promise to a projected $77 billion. To his credit, newly elected Gov. Gavin Newsom, fearing a budget catastrophe, canceled the statewide project while allowing a few miles of the quarter-built Central Valley “track to nowhere” to be finished.
For years, high-speed rail has drained the state budget of transportation funds that might have easily updated nightmarish stretches of the Central Valley’s Highway 99, or ensured that the nearby ossified Amtrak line became a modern two-track line.
California politicians vie with each other to prove their open-borders bona fides in an effort to appeal to the estimated 27 percent of Californians who were not born in the United States.
But the health, educational and legal costs associated with massive illegal immigration are squeezing the budget. About a third of the California budget goes to the state’s Medicare program, Medi-Cal. Half the state’s births are funded by Medi-Cal, and in nearly a third of those state-funded births, the mother is an undocumented immigrant.
California is facing a perfect storm of homelessness. Its labyrinth of zoning and building regulations discourages low-cost housing. Its generous welfare benefits, non-enforcement of vagrancy and public health laws, and moderate climate draw in the homeless. Nearly one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients live in the state, and nearly one in five live below the poverty line.
The result is that tens of thousands of people live on the streets and sidewalks of the state’s major cities, where primeval diseases such as typhus have reappeared.
California’s progressive government seems clueless how to deal with these issues, given that solutions such as low-cost housing and strict enforcement of health codes are seen as either too expensive or politically incorrect.
In sum, California has no margin for error.
Spiraling entitlements, unwieldy pension costs, money wasted on high-speed rail, inadequate water storage and delivery, and lax immigration policies were formerly tolerable only because about 150,000 Californians paid huge but federally deductible state income taxes.
No more. Californians may have once derided the state’s 1 percent as selfish rich people. Now, they are praying that these heavily burdened taxpayers stay put and are willing to pay far more than what they had paid before.
That is the only way California can continue to spend money on projects that have not led to safe roads, plentiful water, good schools and safe streets.
A California reckoning is on the horizon, and it may not be pretty.
• Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, is the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won” (Basic Books, 2017). |
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techno900
Joined: 28 Mar 2001
Posts: 4161
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| Posted: Wed Jun 12, 2019 8:17 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | California lawmakers agree to health benefits for immigrants
Byadam beam, associated press
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Jun 9, 2019, 10:56 PM ET
California will become the first state to pay for some adults living in the country illegally to have full health benefits as the solidly liberal bastion continues to resist the policies of Republican President Donald Trump's administration.
Democrats in the state Legislature reached an agreement Sunday afternoon as part of a broader plan to spend $213 billion of state and federal tax money over the next year. The legislature is expected to approve the deal this week. The agreement means low-income adults between the ages of 19 and 25 living in California illegally would be eligible for California's Medicaid program, the joint state and federal health insurance program for the poor and disabled.
Only those in that age group whose incomes are low enough to qualify for the program would get the health benefits. State officials estimate that group will be about 90,000 people at a cost of $98 million per year. The state Senate had wanted to expand the proposal to include adults 65 and older, but the Newsom administration argued it would cost too much.
"California believes that health is a fundamental right," said state Sen. Holly Mitchell, a Los Angeles Democrat who led the budget negotiations.
The move is part of a larger effort to make sure everyone in California has health insurance. The proposal also makes California the first state in the country to help middle-income families pay their monthly health insurance premiums. It means a family of four earning as much as six times the federal poverty level — or more than $150,000 a year — would be eligible to get about $100 a month from the government to help pay their monthly health insurance premiums.
But to pay for part of it, the state will begin taxing people who don't have health insurance. It's a revival of the individual mandate penalty that had been law nationwide under former President Barack Obama's health care law until Republicans in Congress eliminated it as part of the 2017 overhaul to the tax code.
Republicans on the legislative committee negotiating the budget voted against the proposal, arguing it was not fair to give health benefits to people who are in the country illegally while taxing people who are here legally for not purchasing health insurance.
The budget agreement still must be approved by the full state Legislature. State law requires lawmakers to enact a budget by midnight on June 15. If they don't, lawmakers would lose their pay.
The health care proposals are a win for first-term Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who proposed both of them. Several lawmakers in the Democratic-dominated state legislature wanted to go further by offering health coverage to all adults living in California illegally. But Newsom opposed that, noting it would cost $3.4 billion.
Newsom did not get everything he wanted in the deal. Advocates say more than 1 million people in California don't have access to safe drinking water. Newsom had proposed a 95-cent tax on most residential water bills as well as fees on dairies, animal farms and fertilizer sellers, to help water districts pay for improvements and boost supplies. Lawmakers rejected the tax, arguing it was too burdensome in a year when the state is projected to have a $21.5 billion surplus — the largest in at least 20 years.
Instead, lawmakers decided to use $130 million in existing tax revenue to pay for the drinking water improvements. Most of that money — about $100 million — would come from the state's sale of carbon credits as part of its "cap and trade" program. The move means the state's agricultural industry, whose pollution is often blamed for the drinking water problems, would have ab out $100 million less than it normally gets from the program for various projects.
Newsom also wanted to spend an additional $800 million to boost the annual tax refunds for low-income people who have at least one child under the age of 6. But to pay for it, he wanted to selectively adopt some of the changes to the federal tax code that Trump signed into law in 2017. The changes, which would mostly impact businesses, would have brought the state an extra $1 billion.
But the legislature did not include the tax changes in its version of the budget proposal. Instead, lawmakers said they hope to reach a tax agreement outside of the budget process by July 1. |
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MalibuGuru
Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9300
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| Posted: Wed Jun 12, 2019 8:31 am Post subject: |
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I pay a shitload of taxes in California. I'm considering moving.
Researching now. Might be Nevada north shore residence, but Hawaii in winter and Malibu during 4 months of summer.
Then I won't have to pay for 50 Chandler's easy lifestyles. |
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