FMLA only covers companies with 50 or more employees.
A friend was fired in the US when she told her boss she was pregnant and discovered this limitation. Her previous work experience was in France so she did not realize this could happen.
Dno. The roads here are way better than other places with lower taxes, it’s beautiful, the air and water are clean, and so on.
Everywhere has plenty of things to complain about. I’d like to spend less in taxes, always.
But at least it does feel, objectively, like we live in a mostly lovely place that actually does protect employees, have access to great healthcare, great roads, great charging infrastructure (relative to the rest of the US) and so on.
Anecdotal, but I have driven across a majority of US states, from Florida to Alaska (and also, on both the East and West sides of Canada) and haven't noticed any strong correlation between the quality of the roads and how high a states taxes are.
Did you drive between Texas - Louisiana? It is a massive difference almost immediately. You go from 55mph top speed limit with many potholes in LA to smooth 75mph Texas roads. Texas roads are much better and I have heard the same opinion many times from people making that drive. Louisiana makes their roads cheaper by making them much more thin, and they don’t get repaired often in rural areas.
There's probably a lot of noise in the data. Off the top of my head, climate (whether roads are exposed to freeze-thaw cycles) and population density/clustering (how many miles of road do you need to maintain per person), are probably more strongly correlated with quality than taxation levels.
Since you mentioned Florida, the roads go from good to bad as soon as you cross the border into Alabama, which is a really interesting experience on the interstate. But yes, the roads are bad in Deep South states, although the taxes aren’t really that low either (just people don’t make much money to get much out of them).
For a state that often bemoans the federal government and its out of control spending, Texas takes an impressive amount of funds and puts it into a very high-quality and modern interstate system.
Texas will receive over $27 billion (with a B) over the next ~5 years in federal funding for highways and bridges alone. $10 billion was allocated across 2022-2023. Many of their roads are quite nice and only going to improve. Thanks, Uncle Sam!
Cross from IL to WI on 94. The toll road ends and the reads are so much better. Of course WI will pull over any speeder with out of state plates. They even take credit cards to pay your fine on the spot.
I grew up in the suburbs. My town had pretty much no commercial base. The next town over had a huge mall. They had much better roads, a much better library, a sports complex, a swimming pool complex, the list goes on. It was obvious to a 10 year old how much of a difference the tax base made.
Of course, we just got a library card in their district and I enjoyed the use of the nicer library as well. But still.
I noticed an immediate degradation in surface quality on the interstate when I crossed into Alabama. Aren't the states responsible for upkeep using federal dollars? Some states are better than others at this.
Tell that to Mississippi which has s*t roads and no winter freezing/thawing or salt to consider. Broke ass red states can barely afford to keep their roads passable for the most part. There are a couple of exceptions where the states are willing to starve their children to keep the roads up, but most red states fail at both feeding kids and maintaining roads. If it wasn't for the cash infusion from the well off blue states, the red states would literally be third world.
It truly depends within CA. San Diego or suburbs of LA? It's pristine. Bay Area? The roads flood with the slightest bit of rain and have potholes the size of a basketball.
My experience is that the Florida roads are significantly better than the roads in the bay area. And Florida has no income tax and lower sales taxes than California.
Bay Area, but I’m from NYC, so my standard for “bad road” is relatively high - there are a lot of potholes right now from the rain, but in general they get fixed quickly, the roads are wide and many-lanes, and generally don’t do insane things like loop back on themselves or anything like that.
I disagree with this. I live in SF and the roads range from terrible to just-ok. And not just in the city; US-101 is just kinda ok (despite vaguely-regular maintenance), and many local roads I see in nearby smaller towns and cities (South SF, Daly City, Belmont, San Mateo) are -- at best -- just ok. Similar situation when I drive north toward Sonoma.
A major issue in SF proper is that crews are constantly digging up parts of roads to work on pipes or whatever, and then patch them in a haphazard, crappy way. Roads get fully resurfaced rarely. As an example, there's a super nasty patched and re-patched and re-patched and re-patched section of 18th St (between Minnesota and Tennessee) that has been a nightmare for at least 4 years now.
A section of Tennessee between 18th and 19th was resurfaced about a year ago (in part because there was building construction along the road that did heavy damage), but just this past week they were digging up a large section in the center of the road to do some work underneath, and when they patched it up, they as usual did a crap job, so the road sucks again.
I grew up in New Jersey (80s) and Maryland (90s), and the roads were much better maintained in both of those places, Maryland especially.
> The roads here are way better than other places with lower taxes
I live in San Francisco and absolutely disagree with this. The roads are garbage. And lest we think that's just a city thing, whenever I leave the city and drive out on local and state roads they range from garbage to ok-ish.
My family moved to Maryland when I was a teenager, and the roads there were pristine (90s, not sure about nowadays). It felt like some section of some road or highway near me was always being resurfaced.
> Though Texas has no state-level personal income tax, it does levy relatively high consumption and property taxes on residents to make up the difference. Ultimately, it has a higher effective state and local tax rate for a median U.S. household at 12.73% than California's 8.97%, according to a new report from WalletHub.
Obviously there are more than two states, but it’s not so simple.
Plus, someone’s got to pay for everything:
> [California] receives $0.99 in federal expenditures per dollar of taxes paid, which is below the national average return for states of $1.22 per dollar paid, according to its review of a 2015 New York Comptroller study.
Bizarrely, even experts miss this obvious fact. If not income taxes, then how does government pay the bills? Income taxes are usually the most progressive tax, so no income tax usually means less wealthy people pay more. If government spends less, what services are cut?
Yeah it's very funny hearing my dad talk about how nice it is to have no income tax in Washington (he's a dentist). But when you tell him that the relatively higher income tax is worse for poor people he doesn't seem to agree. Washington is certainly a progressive state on the whole, but the taxation is horrible.
What solution does that offer? People have been debating what to keep and cut for generations, as well as ways to improve spending; I don't see any low-hanging fruit or big improvements there.
I lived in Texas making six figures as a SWE. Texas was not far better tax wise. Texas does a lot to ding you in ways that aren't taxes, and buying a home that doesn't involve an hour and a half commute one way is unrealistic.
Yeah. I totally get why people conceptually hate the idea of paying taxes, even if my values lead me to a very different conclusion. That said, most of the arguments I've encountered about places with higher taxes being worse places to live strike me as either glib and uninformed, or in bad faith. That's not a partisan-specific folly by any measure, but it's a folly nonetheless.
It is an honest argument. No point in a secure job that can't even pay rent. But people with families can't exactly engage in multi job hustles and expect to remain a healthy unit.
It depends on how high the taxes are and what protection is offered exactly. The extra protections I would get in California are not worth nearly enough for it to be worth for me.
Totally agree. When taxes are the highest in the country and take almost 40% of your income and the only people who own houses are the ones that bought them 20-50 years ago that is very employee unfriendly.
Now, the housing market is not great but again, greatly overstating your case is not an effective strategy, and it isn’t a uniquely California problem even though prop 13 makes it worse there than many other places.
Show me a married couple both working in tech in California which is what this website is for and show me their average tax rate. It will be almost 40% at the lower end of this income range. This stuff is not rocket science.
Then do the sales tax as well. I’m not exaggerating anything. This is why my family and so many others moved from the state during COVID.
Have fun buying tiny $2-3 million dollar homes paying 40%.
>Show me a married couple both working in tech in California
I didn't know everyone on this site met their spouses at work. Statistics say that's been dwindling for 15 years or so. Then you account for the 20-30% of women in tech (and the fact that not every woman wants to marry a techie)...
Still, congrats on your situation.
>Have fun buying tiny $2-3 million dollar homes paying 40%.
Well, I'm single (with worse rates) and CA is 9.3% for my bracket + 24% federal. Doesn't seem too unreasonable. Sounds more like a housing issue than a tax issue.
It's also why I live out in a suburb. I know people online these days glamorize walkable cities, but California right now isn't very "walkable", even if we could redesign everything tomorrow. Lot of other deep seeded issues to solve first.
You’re the one making the claim, why can’t you show us your calculations? I can’t reproduce your numbers unless you’re assuming a truly massive real-estate assessment.
These are the rates and includes a over million 1% tax for mental support.
California 13.3%
Hawaii 11%
New York 10.9%
New Jersey 10.75%
District of Columbia 10.75%
Oregon 9.9%
Minnesota 9.85%
Massachusetts 9%
Vermont 8.75%
Wisconsin 7.65%
Tax burden is a different measurement including property. Parent poster has no property.
So, yes, if you’re making millions per year in taxable income, California’s top rate is higher. That is not a concern for anyone outside of the 99.5th percentile, which is uncommon even in FAANG circles.
Tax burden is also the best metric to use because the money has to come from somewhere. If you’re trying to decide where to live, looking at state income tax only is as foolish as only looking at housing purchase prices without also considering your commute, utility, and maintenance expenses.
I find it weird that people quote top-tax-bracket rates and try to use tha tto directly compare state taxes.
That's nonsensical. You need to compare the effective tax rate that people pay.
When I was making bank at tech, sure, I was in CA's top tax bracket. But I never paid that rate across all my income. My effective tax rate was quite a bit lower.
We bought a home 11 miles from the Googleplex in 2009 and paid it off in 15 years and did it on a single salary working in non-profit tech. Your assumptions here are deeply flawed or your reasoning is broken.
So, two years after the nearly existential crash of 2007 and only one year after Sequoia's famous "RIP Good Times" memo, when housing prices were at their absolute lowest and investment in the Bay Area was at its lowest ebb since at least the dot-com crash.
He was responding to the absurd assertion that nobody has bought a house in California in two decades. It’s not cheap but that’s pure hyperbole, and Asa was reminding him of that.
Yes this is one of the risks of working for a very small employer. A lot of the normal rules don't apply. But if a company is big enough to have "HR" I'm guessing they likely are bigger than 50 employees.
https://www.rigginslaw.com/cfra-vs-fmla-difference-between-c....
CA really is by far one of the most employee-friendly states, on nearly every issue.