“Californians already labor under sales-tax rates usually reserved for states without income taxes (at8.25% [9.25% in L.A. County], the nation’s highest) and sharply progressive income-tax rates usually reserved for states without sales taxes (the state’s top rate is 10.55%, and it doesn’t allow you to deduct your federal taxes, as some states with income taxes do).”
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“California’s four most influential Democrats are [Jerry] Brown, U.S. Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, who are 73, 77, 70 and 71, respectively: ‘No other state’s political ruling class is as gray, a terrific irony for youth-worshipping California.’ [State senate leader Bob] Dutton and other relatively anonymous Republican legislators can, by being constructively obdurate (“no”), shake the foundations of reactionary liberalism — the regulatory state that seemed so right in the septuagenarians’ formative years, a half-century ago.”