Millionaires Consider Leaving California Over Taxes - NYTimes.com

Millionaires Consider Leaving California Over Taxes - NYTimes.com.

It is getting awfully expensive to be a millionaire in California. 

With the new year, big earners are confronting a 51.9 percent federal-state income tax hit on earnings over $1 million, the result of a confluence of new tax-the-rich levies imposed by California and Congress in the closing days of 2012. That is officially the highest in the nation. And at 13.3 percent, the top-tier California income tax is, in addition to being higher than any other state, the steepest it has been since World War II.

Enoch Ensley:

Never Tax Anything

That Would Be of Value to Your State,

That Could and Would Run Away, or

That Could and Would Come to You.

Ensley, writing in 1871, had it right.  But he failed to note the #1 rule of real estate -- Location, location, location -- and that a great location is worth every penny one spends for it.

What the public hasn't noticed is that, while those locations are worth every penny, the lion's share of all those pennies are going to individuals and corporations, not to the community -- we-the-people, whose investment in public goods (as well as our simple presence), MAKES those choice locations choice!!  And of course we've not noted that by right, that value belongs to all of us, and is the rational source for funding our investment in public goods, year in and year out.