5 ms·

The Not-So-Golden State of California

41 points by weaksauce 17y ago

costan 17y ago
Is there any good source of data about the best place to start a company?
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  Surely what you want is the best data about good places to start a company. The real answer: it depends on your criteria. Delaware is the cheapest place to incorporate, but nobody knows where it is. Nevada is the best place if your business involves lots of cash and/or hookers. Silicon valley may still be the best if you want to meet like-minded geeks. Hollywood stays in LA both for the infrastructure and the weather. Michigan has great incentives right now if you don't mind the cold winters...see the problem?
  - mahmud 17y ago
    I think I like Nevada.
  - costan 17y ago
    I was looking for numbers, like the incorporation tax and state taxes for each type of company. If the data was neatly put together somewhere, we could all draw our own conclusions.
- 3pt14159 17y ago
  If you are reliant on programmers/developers Canada is a great place to make a start up. Very tech-friendly and all those health care costs are offloaded to your workers' personal taxes. Toronto has high property tax, but very near by Mississauga and Thornhill have a ton of smart people and very low taxes, Waterloo is good too. Best of all these guys cost far less (in USD) than Seattle or Silicon Valley programmers. Most of the governments in Canada (National, Provincial, and Municipal) are solvent, even in net-present-value terms, and crime and corruption is astoundingly low. If you are hoping to sell off the company quickly, incorporate both in Delaware AND Canada and figure out how to sell the services through the Delaware office, so when it comes time for the acquisition you can easily be bought out by American interests.
anigbrowl 17y ago
Although I'm a fan of Nolan Bushnell, this kind of blog posting is so lacking in content as to be useless. So regulation is onerous in California - fair enough. When did the burden of regulation reach a tipping point that made it too much of a handicap? how was it in the old days? What regulations, specifically, are the problem - taxation, employment law, consumer safety, or what? California's government is the problem. The state is business-hostile. It is merit-hostile. It has the highest tax rates and returns less in services to its average citizens. Massive pension abuses are not dealt with. One wonders if California's emphasis on citizen democracy is at the root of the problem. It's certainly left us with the best democracy that money can buy, which turns out to be a pretty bad one.
- Andys 17y ago
  I'm not sure about the 'citizen democracy' part... Did citizen democracy come up with the crazy electricity market system? (I'm not familiar enough with California - But if it did, you got what you deserved :-))
  - anigbrowl 17y ago
    I was more thinking of the property tax caps (which may not have been such a good idea, but are hard to change) and the fact that you can get just about any old BS onto the ballot with 500,000 signatures, which you can collect for 1-2 million. Meantime, it takes 2/3 of the legislature to pass a budget and it's been late something like 17 out of the past 18 years. I do approve of the idea of ballot initiatives, but between one thing and another it's made our state terribly unwieldy to govern.
- ckinnan 17y ago
  California has some of the highest tax rates in the nation and is 48th in the nation in terms of business tax competitiveness. http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp58.pdf http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp58.pdf
  - evgen 17y ago
    So what? This is not a new condition, so one would have expected it to have some significant impact by now if this was really a factor to anyone outside of the "I got mine so screw you" set. Yet California's economy is still overwhelmingly larger than that of any other state in the nation. If the costs of operating in California were not outweighed by the benefits you would have expected businesses to flee the state and not be replaced; this hasn't happened yet and the odds favor California coming out of the recession at the same pace as the rest of the country.
rms 17y ago
This was probably the best article on the topic. http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm?STORY_ID=13649050 http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm... Posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645478 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645478
quisxt 17y ago
Yeah, right. California's problem is that we keep on spending money like it's flowing in like water, yet the flow was greatly reduced 30 years ago with the passage of proposition 13. Instead of trying to live within our means, we voted people into office who either wanted to spend more, xor reduce taxes and then we made the problem much worse by passing a slew of costly initiatives without being willing to raise the money to fund them fully. So here we are. The governor screwed us, the state senate and legislature screwed us, but ultimately, we screwed ourselves, and now we're going to have to pay for it. As someone who lived most of my 38 years in this state, went to UC, and has the joy of living in one of the most beautiful places on earth, it makes me profoundly sad to see what we have done to ourselves.
- gscott 17y ago
  The rich love to assail Proposition 13 but without it a normal person could not retire in Califronia after working a lifetime in California. The other problems are as you mentioned and are obvious to everyone not in Sacramento.
  - quisxt 17y ago
    Whether or not that is the case, the initiative immediately cut property tax income by 57(?)% and made it much more difficult for the state to raise money by increasing taxes. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but you can't lower taxes without also decreasing spending. As far as the problem being obvious to "everyone not in Sacramento," clearly you are wrong because here we are, and the voters of California played an active role in bringing us here.
    - gscott 17y ago
      The home value is reset when a house is sold. There has been a lot of buying and selling lately in California. I have a friend who recently bought a house and his property taxes are like rent, it is just that expensive. He could rent a 1 bedroom apartment with his property taxes. Money is coming in but as you said, too much money is being spent (through ballot intiatives (high speed rail for example) and the legislature gone-wild. But I believe that the gone-wild days have come to an abrupt end and mostly thanks to Schwarzenegger who has nothing to loose by being rational.
hyperbovine 17y ago
Paraphrasing something I heard on NPR... California is the 8th largest economy in the world. We have the world's most productive agricultural region, two of the world's top universities, the largest port in the US, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and tourism. WHY THE HELL CAN'T WE MAKE IT WORK?
- sarvesh 17y ago
  Because we expect too much for what we pay in taxes, add to that we also elect some of the dumbest people into office.
- TriinT 17y ago
  "We have the world's most productive agricultural region" I doubt that California can beat hi-tech farms in Brazil and South Africa. The climate is good, but not that good. "two of the world's top universities" It's more like three: Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley. The other UC schools are quite good too. For instance, UCLA is strong in math, while UCSB is strong in physics, etc.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

41 points by weaksauce 17y ago

costan 17y ago

Is there any good source of data about the best place to start a company?

anigbrowl 17y ago
Surely what you want is the best data about good places to start a company. The real answer: it depends on your criteria. Delaware is the cheapest place to incorporate, but nobody knows where it is. Nevada is the best place if your business involves lots of cash and/or hookers. Silicon valley may still be the best if you want to meet like-minded geeks. Hollywood stays in LA both for the infrastructure and the weather. Michigan has great incentives right now if you don't mind the cold winters...see the problem?
- mahmud 17y ago
  I think I like Nevada.
- costan 17y ago
  I was looking for numbers, like the incorporation tax and state taxes for each type of company. If the data was neatly put together somewhere, we could all draw our own conclusions.
3pt14159 17y ago
If you are reliant on programmers/developers Canada is a great place to make a start up. Very tech-friendly and all those health care costs are offloaded to your workers' personal taxes. Toronto has high property tax, but very near by Mississauga and Thornhill have a ton of smart people and very low taxes, Waterloo is good too. Best of all these guys cost far less (in USD) than Seattle or Silicon Valley programmers. Most of the governments in Canada (National, Provincial, and Municipal) are solvent, even in net-present-value terms, and crime and corruption is astoundingly low. If you are hoping to sell off the company quickly, incorporate both in Delaware AND Canada and figure out how to sell the services through the Delaware office, so when it comes time for the acquisition you can easily be bought out by American interests.

anigbrowl 17y ago

Although I'm a fan of Nolan Bushnell, this kind of blog posting is so lacking in content as to be useless. So regulation is onerous in California - fair enough. When did the burden of regulation reach a tipping point that made it too much of a handicap? how was it in the old days? What regulations, specifically, are the problem - taxation, employment law, consumer safety, or what? California's government is the problem. The state is business-hostile. It is merit-hostile. It has the highest tax rates and returns less in services to its average citizens. Massive pension abuses are not dealt with. One wonders if California's emphasis on citizen democracy is at the root of the problem. It's certainly left us with the best democracy that money can buy, which turns out to be a pretty bad one.

Andys 17y ago
I'm not sure about the 'citizen democracy' part... Did citizen democracy come up with the crazy electricity market system? (I'm not familiar enough with California - But if it did, you got what you deserved :-))
- anigbrowl 17y ago
  I was more thinking of the property tax caps (which may not have been such a good idea, but are hard to change) and the fact that you can get just about any old BS onto the ballot with 500,000 signatures, which you can collect for 1-2 million. Meantime, it takes 2/3 of the legislature to pass a budget and it's been late something like 17 out of the past 18 years. I do approve of the idea of ballot initiatives, but between one thing and another it's made our state terribly unwieldy to govern.
ckinnan 17y ago
California has some of the highest tax rates in the nation and is 48th in the nation in terms of business tax competitiveness. http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp58.pdf http://www.taxfoundation.org/files/bp58.pdf
- evgen 17y ago
  So what? This is not a new condition, so one would have expected it to have some significant impact by now if this was really a factor to anyone outside of the "I got mine so screw you" set. Yet California's economy is still overwhelmingly larger than that of any other state in the nation. If the costs of operating in California were not outweighed by the benefits you would have expected businesses to flee the state and not be replaced; this hasn't happened yet and the odds favor California coming out of the recession at the same pace as the rest of the country.

rms 17y ago

This was probably the best article on the topic. http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm?STORY_ID=13649050 http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displayStory.cfm... Posted here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645478 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=645478

quisxt 17y ago

Yeah, right. California's problem is that we keep on spending money like it's flowing in like water, yet the flow was greatly reduced 30 years ago with the passage of proposition 13. Instead of trying to live within our means, we voted people into office who either wanted to spend more, xor reduce taxes and then we made the problem much worse by passing a slew of costly initiatives without being willing to raise the money to fund them fully. So here we are. The governor screwed us, the state senate and legislature screwed us, but ultimately, we screwed ourselves, and now we're going to have to pay for it. As someone who lived most of my 38 years in this state, went to UC, and has the joy of living in one of the most beautiful places on earth, it makes me profoundly sad to see what we have done to ourselves.

gscott 17y ago
The rich love to assail Proposition 13 but without it a normal person could not retire in Califronia after working a lifetime in California. The other problems are as you mentioned and are obvious to everyone not in Sacramento.
- quisxt 17y ago
  Whether or not that is the case, the initiative immediately cut property tax income by 57(?)% and made it much more difficult for the state to raise money by increasing taxes. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but you can't lower taxes without also decreasing spending. As far as the problem being obvious to "everyone not in Sacramento," clearly you are wrong because here we are, and the voters of California played an active role in bringing us here.
  - gscott 17y ago
    The home value is reset when a house is sold. There has been a lot of buying and selling lately in California. I have a friend who recently bought a house and his property taxes are like rent, it is just that expensive. He could rent a 1 bedroom apartment with his property taxes. Money is coming in but as you said, too much money is being spent (through ballot intiatives (high speed rail for example) and the legislature gone-wild. But I believe that the gone-wild days have come to an abrupt end and mostly thanks to Schwarzenegger who has nothing to loose by being rational.

hyperbovine 17y ago

Paraphrasing something I heard on NPR... California is the 8th largest economy in the world. We have the world's most productive agricultural region, two of the world's top universities, the largest port in the US, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and tourism. WHY THE HELL CAN'T WE MAKE IT WORK?

sarvesh 17y ago
Because we expect too much for what we pay in taxes, add to that we also elect some of the dumbest people into office.
TriinT 17y ago
"We have the world's most productive agricultural region" I doubt that California can beat hi-tech farms in Brazil and South Africa. The climate is good, but not that good. "two of the world's top universities" It's more like three: Caltech, Stanford, Berkeley. The other UC schools are quite good too. For instance, UCLA is strong in math, while UCSB is strong in physics, etc.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]