We, The Taxpayers
California’s arcane system of state and local taxes hits every household differently. To gauge the bite, The Times asked a cross-section of Southern California residents to pull out their tax returns and talk about the system. To make it easier to compare these tax bills to your own, the stories are color-coded with the charts shown here, which provide several measures of tax bite and after-tax wealth.
Income Groups Defined: Using Franchise Tax Board data for 1970, 1980 and 1990, The Times divided tax-paying households by income into five groups of equal size. In 1990, the groups were defined this way:
SUSANN PRUITT: Middle (Middle 20%) $17,001 to $30,000
AGE: 34
WHERE: Costa Mesa
JOB: Customer service representative
1992 INCOME: $23,000 (including child support)
1992 STATE AND LOCAL TAXES: $600
VIEWPOINT: “Americans need to pay taxes, of course. But the government wastes the money it’s already collected from us and then tells us to pay more.”
If she hadn’t bought a 1983 Volvo for $3,500 last year, Susann Pruitt figures she would have paid almost no sales tax.
“Let’s see,” she says. “I didn’t buy any clothes. I almost never go out to eat. After rent, child care, utilities and auto insurance, I just don’t have any money left over.”
Susann moved to Orange County from Portland, Ore., in April of 1992 with her now three-year-old daughter, Jessica. Recently divorced, she lived with friends until she could find work.
“I applied for 30 openings in two weeks,” says Susann, who had not worked since her pregnancy. Within a couple of months, she landed a clerical job at a moving and storage company in Costa Mesa.
She pays $810 a month for a two-bedroom apartment near her office and another $360 for day care. “When my child support check is late, I panic,” she says.
While Susann insists that she doesn’t “pay much attention to politics and taxes,” in conversation it seems she has given such matters a great deal of thought.
“It has become too profitable to to be a public official,” she says. “Politicians will say and do anything to get into office because of the perks, not to serve the people. It’s a lot cheaper for big corporations to pay off politicians than to pay their fair share of taxes.”
Because she worked only half a year and received a renter’s credit, Susann paid no California income tax in 1992. “I’m not one who can complain about being overtaxed,” she says.
In fact, she’d like to see more tax money go toward public education. “You cannot pull someone out of poverty without educating them,” she says. “When I got out of high school, I wasn’t prepared to do anything but work a minimum-wage job.”
WHAT SHE PAID:
Oregon income tax: $43
California income tax: $0
Property Tax: $0
Estimated sales tax: $600
State and Local Taxes as a Percentage of Income: 2.6%
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Data analysis by Richard O’Reilly, Times directoy of computer analysis, and Times researcher Nona Yates from Franchise Tax Board, California Department of Finance and State Board of Equalization data.
