Athletes, others in California on business get dunned by the state

The tax also applies to a blues singer from Chicago, a home-care nurse from Nevada, and a novelist from Montana. According to the Los Angeles Times, an out-of-state salesman earning $50,000 a year, about $200 a day, would owe 9.3 percent of that, $18.60 a day, to California. Such people are not as easy to track as Shaquille O'Neal and other professional athletes, whose stellar salaries, usually public knowledge, make them an easy target for the "jock tax" that actually applies to everyone. Like all taxes, it has consequences.

Because other states retaliate, California's money grab is really a kind of zero-sum game. The Bee's report also notes that high taxes make contracts with California teams worth less money, and that state tax laws are now a factor in contract negotiations. It may not come out in the sports pages, but athletes have solid fiscal grounds for wanting to work elsewhere. So does everybody else, and many are doing so.

Last year the number of California residents moving out exceeded those moving in. This should come as no surprise in a state unfriendly to entrepreneurship and which deploys a punitive tax structure. Single individuals hit the 9.3-percent bracket at just under $42,000, hardly rock-star wages. That rate is only a point below the peak of 10.3 percent, the highest marginal rate of all 50 states. As Pacific Research Institute showed in its study "Taxing Times: How California's Steep Income Tax Stifles Economic Growth," the tax should be flattened and compressed. Whether we should have a state income tax at all should be debated. In California, everyone spends far too many "duty days" working for the government.

That's why people vote with their feet and leave California, a state that once attempted to tax editorial cartoons on the same basis as works of art purchased in a gallery – a scheme known as the "laugh tax." That, like the "jock tax," is what passes for ingenuity in Sacramento. Any way to wring more money out of the people is fair game. That dynamic must change if California's economic fortunes are to be restored. This should not be a difficult matter. Ingenuity and zeal should be transferred to finding ways to lower taxes, and toward exposure of the state's prodigious waste and corruption.

California employs people to expose waste and fraud but, unfortunately, agencies such as the California Department of Education sometimes prefer to fire and demote these workers rather than heed their warnings. State funds are now flowing to attorneys defending the Education Department against its own employees.

Meanwhile, the forthcoming California Education Report Card (published by the Pacific Research Institute) quotes Paul Meyers, an Education Department official, who says of one categorical program: "We don't know how the money is being used. We wish we did."

So do the California taxpayers, who provided the money. Consider also Carolyn Macchiavellie, an Education Department official who oversees English Language Acquisition in California. Asked by a reporter where the money goes for that program, Macchiavellie said: "I have no idea. There's no audit. There's nothing."

That kind of glib agnosticism with public funds probably merits a visit from law enforcement. But maybe the newly reminted Schwarzenegger administration could relieve Duane Hoffman from tracking Shaquille and assign the intrepid tax-hunting sleuth to these cases.