Billionaire Jeffrey Gundlach slams California over taxes, may leave state

Billionaire Jeffrey Gundlach slams California over taxes, may leave state(foxbusiness.com)

17 points by matan_a 5 years ago | 26 comments

textech 5 years ago |

Not from California but I don't blame him. Instead of controlling waste, the usual answer from state and local governments (particularly in California) seems to be raise the taxes. When you have janitors making making 250k+ you have some serious issues and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The sheer number of administrative positions, departments and salaries just boggle my mind.

https://time.com/4555692/san-francisco-bart-janitor-salary/

https://www.openthebooks.com/forbes-why-california-is-in-tro...

msie 5 years ago | |

Only a few janitors (5) are making more than their base salary because they take all the overtime slots. Read the article.

jbob2000 5 years ago | | |

My cousin works for the government and talks about how overtime is very easy to abuse if you want to. In his case, he manages water works, which involves testing water regularly and inspecting equipment.

At any point during the weekend or holidays, he can just decide to go in to do an inspection and run up some overtime hours. As well, they have an alert system that notifies him by phone if some of the machines are acting up. He can change the sensitivity of the system so that it alerts him for minor things, requiring him to come in and get overtime. On paper, this all looks legit - it’s just a guy who cares about his job and wants to keep everything running smoothly - but he quietly admits to the family that the work is never needed and he’s just doing it for the overtime.

I can definitely see how a janitor could abuse overtime, there’s always something you could argue “needed” to be done.

api 5 years ago |

People can blast him for being greedy, but here's the thing about California and its taxes: they are being wasted.

We have a state with awful public transit, tent cities of homeless people, decaying infrastructure, wildfires (yes its partly a Federal problem but the state could do something), gross inequality between school districts, and chronically terrible urban planning leading to a housing shortage. California is incredibly wealthy and is relatively high tax (though by no means the highest) so what bottomless pit is that money falling into? California is a money pit where no amount of cash fixes anything. Might as well just set money on fire.

You could say the same thing about America as a whole. We pay only a bit less in taxes than Canada (at least if you're middle class) but get a fraction of the benefits.

I'd be sympathetic with a tax increase if current money were being spent wisely, but don't ask for more money when you can't even build one high speed rail line at 10X the cost of anywhere else in the world.

dbtc 5 years ago | |

The wealthiest people and corporations pay proportionally a tiny amount of tax and then they get subsidized and bailed out by the middling middle class.

Canada doesn't have a ridiculous semiprivate health industry that could probably deliver free healthcare to a smaller state with what it spends on lobbying alone.

I think a deeper truth is that America has a split personality: partly it wants to be a grownup nation, and partly it wants to still play Wild West.

istorical 5 years ago | |

Yeah the ugly truth is that both the democrats and the republicans are often right. Social welfare and public spending is important and needed, and social welfare and public spending is also atrociously mismanaged. But we conveniently pretend the other side doesn't have a point on this because admitting they are right would weaken our own position.

api 5 years ago | | |

As a result we often get the worst of both worlds, like the US healthcare system which combines everything bad about socialized medicine with everything bad about privatized medicine.

jinushaun 5 years ago | |

Having lived in both expensive and high tax cities like SF and NYC, I never got the sense that my tax money was being wasted in NYC like I did in SF. Everything is better and the city is always improving itself in NYC. Where does the money go in SF?

nadezhda18 5 years ago | | |

Is the state of public transit in NYC (subway) better than in SF? I had an impression it's horrible (everybody hates it) and it's a total money pit.

danielrpa 5 years ago | |

California taxes you a lot more than other states, but doesn't give you better services than other states. I say that because I've lived in 4 states, California included (for years), and nowhere I felt that my money was wasted more than California. Premium taxes for average, if not below average, services by US standards.

My current county in a southeastern red state charges me 1/3 than what I paid in California in property taxes (absolute dollars, as houses here are MUCH cheaper), but we have well maintained schools, music teachers and a funded library. I had none of the above where I lived in California (Orange County).

api 5 years ago | | |

OC doesn't even have school busing. They say it's because of proposition 13 (which is problematic) but the funds for OC schools are not substantially less than elsewhere in the country where the schools are on average better and there are services like busing.

Where is it all going?

Probably to bloated administration. Colleges are the same story. Tuition has risen massively yet there are fewer tenure track positions for good professors. It's all going to administrators.

foogazi 5 years ago | | |

Ironically Orange County has been a Republican bastion for the last 90 years

rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5 years ago | |

Could this be a downside of being a bit of a one party state? On paper, I imagine if more races were more competitive, we'd see our elected officials work harder to keep their jobs rather than lean back on the party establishment to support them.

This is actually an honest question - I'm not trying to make a political point here. I'm genuinely curious about whether purple states spend their tax dollars better than the very red and very blue ones.

api 5 years ago | | |

It could be. At this point Democrats are basically tenured in California. The state has had Republican governors in the past but that was before present levels of polarization.

justaguy88 5 years ago | |

If you want to say the money is wasted, I think it's on you to provide the examples rather than stating it and then asking others to back you up

panabee 5 years ago | |

the high speed rail line data point is interesting.

are there conditions unique to california that could rationalize this massive gap in cost?

if not, and other governments can build affordable rail lines under comparable conditions, why can't the california government emulate those blueprints?

aversion to wasting money, rather than lack of compassion, seems like a reasonable objection to high taxes. what governments in your opinion offer the best mix of transparency and/or responsible spending?

thanks for sharing.

bobthepanda 5 years ago | |

Toll roads are pretty common in high-tax countries. Canada has some. France, Italy and Japan are pretty much all toll roads.

RickJWagner 5 years ago |

Another article on the same here:

https://www.theblaze.com/news/billionaire-gundlach-leave-cal...

ogre_codes 5 years ago |

"Leaving" California for a billionaire means likely he's going to start claiming taxes in another state while continuing to live in California and enjoy the benefits of being in the state without paying for them.

seiferteric 5 years ago | |

No, CA is very aggressive in going after this kind of thing. Now with the proposed wealth tax mentioned in the article, no one would dare do this.