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If this proposal is adopted, California would essentially have 18 tax brackets, and individuals making less than $50,000 per year would wind up paying double-digit marginal tax rates.
Why does California need all this money? To fund CalCare, its proposed single-payer health-care system. If you want European-level government benefits, you have to pay European-level taxes.
Calling these taxes European-level is actually doing a disservice to Europe, however. The top marginal federal income-tax rate is 37 percent. That means the combined state-federal top marginal income-tax rate in California under this proposal (the actual burden that taxpayers would have to face) would be 55.05 percent. That’s a higher top marginal rate than Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, or the United Kingdom. The only European countries with top marginal rates higher than 55.05 percent are Finland at 56.95 percent and Denmark at 55.9 percent.
Maybe you should consider Albania (imagine typing this in 1975).