> I see you conveniently left out California's low property taxes California's property percentages, if memory serves, are about normal. They're artificially l

> I see you conveniently left out California's low property taxes California's property percentages, if memory serves, are about normal. They're artificially low because of the housing boom, not because CA assess low taxes on property. How it works: Property taxes in CA are reassessed when a home is sold. My understanding is that the argument for that is that people's property taxes don't go up each year without anything changing on their part - for instance, an elderly person who bought their home in 1990 hasn't seen their property taxes triple/quadruple as housing prices did. But California by no means is trying to have low average property taxes, it only happened as a side effect of the explosion in housing prices. > As for "overall revenues from taxes": That bullet point is meaningless, since CA has the highest state population by far -- 50% higher than the second-most populous state, Texas. It's just one bullet point among many, but that's correct. > "Tax yields per citizen" is better (although it would certainly be nice to see a number: do you have one, with a citation, and a table of numbers for other states?) Read it before, didn't find it on a quick Google, so I did by hand: CA total revenue: $249,057,158,000 CA population 2008: 36,756,666 $6,775.83 per person (includes children, elderly, unworking people, etc). So yeah, California doesn't have low taxes, and that's not the reason there's budget problems in CA. Whenever you spend more than what you take in, you're going to have budget problems, regardless of how much you take in.