You get what you pay for. California is able to spend my state taxes on things that I want, and the federal government gets to not pay for those things. Texas

You get what you pay for. California is able to spend my state taxes on things that I want, and the federal government gets to not pay for those things. Texas has to spend federal dollars if they want similar things. Their options are either to not have nice things, or to spend more federal dollars than California does. That's what the deduction attempts to account for.