Posted on 01/23/2007 8:58:21 AM PST by John Jorsett
Christmas is a time when people are thinking about giving. Last Christmas Eve, a story re-emerged about taking — the kind indulged in by the state of California, and centered on the duties of one state employee.
Duane Hoffman is a tax auditor who tracks professional athletes, and specifically their “duty days” in California. The state then shakes them down for state taxes at the same high rates as residents. According to a report in the Sacramento Bee, this brings in some $100 million annually, including $163,000 from a three-day trip by the New York Knicks and $106,000 from the 2006 California sojourn of Yankee infielder Alex Rodriguez. As we noted when we first covered this story (“State Greed Has Consequences,” August 4, 2004) this confiscatory activity is not limited to athletes.
The tax also applies to a blues singer from Chicago, a home-care nurse from Nevada, and a novelist from Montana. According to Kathy Kristoff of the Los Angeles Times, an out-of-state salesman earning $50,000 a year, about $200 a day, would owe 9.3 percent of that, $18.60 a day, to California. Such people are not as easy to track as Shaquille O’Neal and other athletes, whose stellar salaries, usually public knowledge, make them an easy target for the “jock tax” that actually applies to everyone. Like all taxes, it has consequences.
Because other states retaliate, California’s money grab is really a kind of zero-sum game. The Bee’s report also notes that high taxes make contracts with California teams worth less money, and that state tax laws are now a factor in contract negotiations. It may not come out in the sports pages, but athletes have solid fiscal grounds for wanting to work elsewhere. So does everybody else, and many are doing so.
Last year the number of California residents moving out exceeded those moving in. This should come as no surprise in a state unfriendly to entrepreneurship, and which deploys a punitive tax structure. Single individuals hit the 9.3-percent bracket at just under $42,000, hardly rock-star wages. That rate is only a point below the 10.3-percent peak, the highest marginal rate of all 50 states. As Pacific Research Institute showed in Taxing Times: How California’s Steep Income Tax Stifles Economic Growth, the tax should be flattened and compressed. Whether we should have a state income tax at all should be debated. In California, everyone spends far too many “duty days” working for the government.
That’s why people vote with their feet and leave California, a state that once attempted to tax editorial cartoons on the same basis as works of art purchased in a gallery — a scheme known as the “laugh tax.” That, like the “jock tax,” is what passes for ingenuity in Sacramento. Any way to wring more money out of the people is fair game. That dynamic must change if California’s economic fortunes are to be restored. This should not be a difficult matter. Ingenuity and zeal should be transferred to finding ways to lower taxes, and toward exposure of the state’s prodigious waste and corruption.
California employs people to expose waste and fraud but, unfortunately, agencies such as the California Department of Education (CDE) sometimes prefer to fire and demote these workers rather than heed their warnings. State funds are now flowing to attorneys defending the CDE against its own employees.
Meanwhile, the forthcoming California Education Report Card (published by the Pacific Research Institute) quotes Paul Meyers, a CDE official, who says of one categorical program: “We don’t know how the money is being used. We wish we did.”
So do the California taxpayers who provided the money. Consider also Carolyn Macchiavellie, a CDE official who oversees English Language Acquisition in California. Asked by a reporter where the money goes for that program, Macchiavellie said: “I have no idea. There’s no audit. There’s nothing.”
That kind of glib agnosticism with public funds probably merits a visit from law enforcement. But maybe the newly minted Schwarzenegger administration could relieve Duane Hoffman from tracking Shaquille and assign the intrepid sleuth to these cases.
The tea destroyed was contained in three ships, lying near each other at what was called at that time Griffin's wharf, and were surrounded by armed ships of war, the commanders of which had publicly declared that if the rebels, as they were pleased to style the Bostonians, should not withdraw their opposition to the landing of the tea before a certain day, the 17th day of December, 1773, they should on that day force it on shore
Hey, those illegal aliens in the state have a high cost of living. SOMEONE has to support them in the manner to which they have become accustomed! [NO SARCASM!!!!!!]
"This should come as no surprise in a state unfriendly to entrepreneurship, and which deploys a punitive tax structure..."
Much like the US government.
Taxifornia. Run by socialists for socialists.
And the Californians all appear to have moved here to Texas.
Cubans own Florida, Mexicans own California and idiots live in Seattle.
And Colorado where they vote for democrats who are now implementing the same policies they fled.
They couldn't vote on their leaders. We can.
Don't worry, they would NEVER try to drag along there liberal views on land use, gun control, taxation and homosexual activity and inflict them on Texas. Just ask Colorado how easily California Marxists blend in...
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I think California, with its tourist industry, illegal aliens, and others who really don't pay the state income tax, is ripe for a universal sales tax of 10% and abolish all the other taxes.
I'm seriously considering bailing out of California and Texas is one of our leading candidates. But rest assured, I haven't let whatever is in the water out here influence me and don't plan on bringing any of it with me.
Come to Texas. I did it and will never go back.
My nephew, while at his first job after College living in apartments and working in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, continued to get some of his mail sent to his mom's apartment in New York City for three years and did not exchange his NY Drivers license for either NJ or PA. Although he did not get to his mom's apartment often (his fiancee lived in Connecticut), the mail and his unexpired driver's license was grounds enough (from NY's point of view) to claim he had full-time residency in New York during the entire period.
In spite of his employer's testimony, having paid taxes to New Jesrey and Pennsylvania, and his rent receipts from there, New York State charged him with three years of unpaid state income taxes, and they won the court case to collect it as well. Federal courts are very lenient at allowing states to make whatever basis they want to claim "full time residency" and enforce it at will.
Nope. We're getting a bunch of them here in the Peoples' Soviet of Washington.
Readily identified by their driving.
I've heard that from other Texans.
Sadly, for all that I leave tomorrow for a week in Dallas, it's all business with no time to look around.
Run, don't walk.
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