I feel like the quality of life is similar between the two. I don't feel like I was getting anything for the 13%+ extra taxes I was paying in California.
Nearly every California program has a huge amount of wastage. Take:
- High speed rail - 10x the cost of comparable European programs, still haven't built anything. Deadlocked by regulation, lawsuits, and poor planning.
- Or all the fraud in the hospice program, unchecked for years until some YouTuber just... went up to one and made a video.
- Or spending over $1M/homeless on housing the homeless and not being able to do so.
California is a lot of talk (regulations, state programs, taxes) coupled with extremely poor execution.
Where, pray tell, is this state with zero taxes? Próspera?
And just like you describe, it would've been ok if all of the tax money went to the people it was meant to be, but unfortunately CA is built upon n number of middle man companies who each take something off the top.
Some people might argue that it's not meant to be about what you personally get back. Social contract and all that...
I get your other points but this part was phrased in an unfortunate way.
For example, I would be happy paying those 13% taxes in Switzerland, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore! (Some even have lower taxes.) But I felt that money was being totally wasted in California.
I genuinely think CA is something like <10% as efficient with tax money as these countries, and it's largely because certain groups take it as a personal attack when you imply tax inefficiency is a problem.
But that doesn't tell us much about the relationship between that thing and their regulations. The regulations might be supporting the thing, or the thing might be so successful that the damage being done by the regulations becomes tolerable. It's entirely plausible that if other states attempted that level of regulation they'd crumple like tissue paper because they don't have the economic power of California's IT sector to balance out the excess demands being placed on businesses.
Could be inertia.