Thread: California tax revenues $1 Billion over projection

State’s revenues $1 Billion over projection

SACRAMENTO
March 10, 2015 10:41am

• Takes in $6.6 Billion last month

Taxes and fees collected by the California state government in February totaled $6.6 billion, beating estimates in the governor’s proposed 2015-16 budget by $1 billion, or 18.3 percent, says state Controller Betty Yee.

The surge was driven by personal income tax payments of $2.6 billion, 26.3 percent higher than what had been estimated by the governor, and retail sales and use taxes of $3.5 billion, 15.8 percent higher than projected.

Other revenue sources also surpassed expectations, including the alcoholic beverage excise tax, which came in at $55.3 million, 133.9 percent over the estimate.

For the personal income tax, withholding amounts were $168 million higher than anticipated. Meanwhile, refunds to taxpayers were $297 million below projections, the report says.

The new boost puts General Fund receipts for the fiscal year at $68.1 billion, 1.4 percent higher than the governor expected in his budget proposal. The General Fund is the state’s main checking account, the source of most spending.

All three of the state’s main taxes -- income, sales, and corporation -- are 1 percent to 2 percent higher than projected for the 2014-15 fiscal year.

The state ended the month with a General Fund cash deficit for the 2014-15 fiscal year of $11.9 billion, which is 5.3 percent smaller than projected. This deficit was covered by $9.1 billion of internal borrowing and $2.8 billion of external borrowing.

The Controller pursues external borrowing when cash available from special funds is not enough to meet General Fund obligations. The Controller may ask the Treasurer to sell short-term Revenue Anticipation Notes that are repaid by the end of the fiscal year.

http://www.centralvalleybusinesstime.../001/?ID=27917

http://www.alipac.us/f19/22-states-p...tfalls-319364/

http://www.alipac.us/f19/california-...ls-say-276068/

No wonder so many people are moving.

Texas and Washington also export some of their wealthiest residents to California each year
http://www.alipac.us/f19/poor-leave-...n-rich-153734/

http://www.alipac.us/f9/californias-...2060-a-271716/
12/11/14


http://www.alipac.us/f19/californias...illion-315930/
The San Luis Obispo Tribune-May 1, 2015

3/26/15
http://www.alipac.us/f19/new-york-st...inking-318484/

U.S. Posts Biggest Monthly Budget Surplus in Seven Years

Tax receipts surged in April to generate the largest monthly U.S. budget surplus in seven years, a sign that deficits could decline more than analysts had expected amid a continuing economic expansion. 9 minutes ago

Originally Posted by Newmexican

No wonder so many people are moving.

If that's true, it's probably the ones in the higher tax brackets that are leaving while the low to non-tax paying illegals continue to pour in.

Originally Posted by MW

If that's true, it's probably the ones in the higher tax brackets that are leaving while the low to non-tax paying illegals continue to pour in.

A report from the Public Policy Institute of California shows the poor are more likely to leave California than the wealthy.

http://www.alipac.us/f19/poor-leave-...n-rich-153734/

. . . After a year of bad news for middle and lower class renters and homeowners in Los Angeles, there are yet more sobering statistics courtesy of the US Census Bureau, via the LA Times:

according to the Census' state-to-state migration statistics, more workers left California between 2007 and 2013 than arrived and, of those who left, nearly all of them make less than $50,000 a year.

(In fact, some of the upper-income categories actually made relative gains, i.e. more wealthy people moved to California than left.) One of the primary causes is, unsurprisingly, outrageous rents and housing prices. Housing prices have gone up in Los Angeles more than anywhere else in the past 14 years . . .

http://la.curbed.com/archives/2015/0...california.php

Texas Gov. Rick Perry says he may move to California

Robin Abcarian

LOS ANGELES TIMES robin.abcarian​@latimes.com

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who said he might move to California, gives the keynote speech at the California Republican Party convention in Anaheim. (Reed Saxon / Associated Press)


Gov. Rick Perry says he might move to California, the state he's made a career criticizing lately
The "Texas miracle" touted by Gov. Rick Perry turns out to be more of a nightmare for regular working folk


What do you know? It turns out Texas Gov. Rick Perry has an ulterior motive for spending so much time in California. Sure, he’s selling his state to California businesses, promising lower taxes and less regulation. And yeah, he’s positioning himself for a second run at the Republican presidential nomination.

But it also looks like he could be fixin’ to move here when he leaves office at the end of the year.

At least that’s what he told Mark Leibovich of the New York Times magazine, who sat down with the Texas governor recently in Beverly Hills at the Jewish deli Nate ‘n Al.

“Perry told me that he loves California, vacations in San Diego annually, visits the state about six times a year and might even move here in January when he’s done with his 14-year stint running Texas,” Leibovich wrote. “That is, if he does not somehow decide to run for president.”

When I read that, I almost spit out my Chardonnay in my hot tub.

Given that Perry has spent so much time encouraging businesses to leave California for Texas — including running pro-Texas radio spots in California that Gov. Jerry Brown compared to minor flatulence — doesn’t that seem a teensy bit hypocritical? If Texas is so darn great, Gov. Perry, why not stay there?

Because maybe Texas isn’t so darn great after all.
cComments

• Texas has 16.2 % poverty rate, among the highest in the country. That means more people go hungry, and live in squalor then even much poorer states like Kentucky and Tennessee that have half of Texas' tax revenues. Texas also has one the highest teen pregnancy rates, and one the highest HS...
  HARSCHWARZ
  AT 12:22 AM FEBRUARY 15, 2015

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In fact, the so-called Texas Miracle that Perry has touted during multiple trips to the Golden State (and will certainly use as his rational for a presidential run), is not much of a miracle at all. It’s kind of a nightmare for average people.

Periodically, a group of Texas legislators puts out a report called "Texas on the Brink" that compares the state's rankings on public policy issues like education and the environment. The most recent one notes that “Texas has the highest percentage of uninsured adults in the nation, and second highest percentage of uninsured children. Texas is dead last in the percentage of adults who graduated from high school and near last in SAT scores.”

In the March/April/May 2014 issue of Washington Monthly, Phillip Longman essentially demolished the meme that Texas is an oasis for working families and businesses looking for a relief from high-tax, high-regulation states like California.

Longman does not argue with the high rate of job growth in Texas, and acknowledges that many of the jobs are at the high end. But those jobs, he writes, are tied to the huge boom in Texas’s cyclical oil and gas industry, which happens to be on an upswing right now. And the population of Texas may be swelling, but not because Californians are flooding the state.

(In 2012, the net migration of Californians to Texas was 19,697.) Texas population growth is driven by immigration and a high birth rate.

Here’s an excerpt from Longman’s piece, which should be read it its contrarian entirety:

“…[F]or most Americans, as well as for most businesses, moving to Texas would not mean paying less in taxes, and for many it would mean paying more.

"Oh yes, I know what you’ve heard. And it’s true, as the state’s boosters like to brag, that Texas does not have an income tax.

But Texas has sales and property taxes that make its overall burden of taxation on low-wage families much heavier than the national average, while the state also taxes the middle class at rates as high or higher than in California. For instance, non-elderly Californians with family income in the middle 20 percent of the income distribution pay combined state and local taxes amounting to 8.2 percent of their income, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy; by contrast, their counterparts in Texas pay 8.6 percent.

"And unlike in California, middle-class families in Texas don’t get the advantage of having rich people share equally in the cost of providing government services. The top 1 percent in Texas have an effective tax rate of just 3.2 percent. That’s roughly two-fifths the rate that’s borne by the middle class, and just a quarter the rate paid by all those low-wage 'takers' at the bottom 20 percent of the family income distribution. This Robin-Hood-in-reverse system gives Texas the fifth-most-regressive tax structure in the nation.”

So, bottom line: Texas is hospitable ... to large corporations and rich people.

Longman also explains in detail how the tax breaks that Texas doles out to corporations do nothing to benefit what politicians are always touting as the lifeblood of the economy – small businesses and entrepreneurial ventures.

Even worse, low levels of entrepreneurship in the Lone Star State have created barriers to upward mobility. He cites a Harvard/Berkeley study that tracked the upward mobility of children born into “families of modest means in different parts of the country.” The researchers, wrote Longman, discovered that children in San Francisco and Los Angeles and San Diego had only a modest chance of going from the bottom fifth of earners to the top fifth as adults.

“But California,” he wrote, “looks like the land of opportunity compared to Texas.”

Texas kids have about half the chance that California kids do of transcending their families’ economic conditions, leading Longman to conclude that “the claim that Texas triumphs over the rest of America as the land of opportunity is all hat and no cattle.”

Which gets us back to Perry, who seems to be having the equivalent of a geographical mid-life crisis.

Even as he told the New York Times that he’s thinking about moving to California, he told reporters in Sacramento the state is “losing its lustre.”

Sounds like he talking out both sides of his mouth. Or maybe he's just trying to keep us to himself.

http://www.latimes.com/local/abcaria...17-column.html