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:
RUTH DURDEN: Low (Bottom 20%) $1 to $%9,000
AGE: 58
WHERE: Fullerton
JOB: Housekeeper
1992 INCOME: $7,200
1992 STATE AND LOCAL TAXES: $1,000
VIEWPOINT: “The rich can afford to pick up the slack. Taxes really hurt poor people trying to make an honest living.”
It’s been years since Ruth Durden earned enough money to owe income tax. Nonetheless, she bristles at the very thought of a tax system that in her view favors the affluent.
“The rich get away with murder,” Ruth says. “They should be taxed more and poor people should be taxed less. Rich people are out lying on the beach while we’re working our fingers to the bone.”
She makes about $600 a month cleaning houses. “But you’d never guess what I do by looking at my house,” she jokes. Every shelf and table in her sunny, cluttered living room teems with haphazardly arranged knickknacks, from ornate candlesticks to ceramic torsos.
The 58-year-old grandmother, who tires more easily these days because of recently diagnosed diabetes, cleans three or four houses a week. “I clean a bit, huff and puff a bit, sit down a bit,” she says.
When her father died four years ago, Ruth and her sister inherited his house--a turn-of-the-century bungalow on a jacaranda-lined street in Fullerton. “I used to pay $300 a month to rent an apartment,” she says. “Boy, I don’t know what I’d do if I still had to pay rent.”
She does, however, pay a portion of the property tax bill. “It’s just too expensive,” she says, though she is not sure whether Proposition 13 helped or hurt her.
Her biggest complaint is the sales tax: “They need to lower it. It hits the poor people.” If taxes have to be increased, she says, “we could stand a little more income tax.”
More tax money should be earmarked for “keeping kids off the street,” Durden adds. “Schools have got to teach kids to stop killing each other. I’ve got four grandsons, age 7 to age 16, and I’m really worried about them.”
WHAT SHE PAID:
State Income Tax: $0
Property tax: $800
Estimated sales tax: $232
State and Local Taxes as a Percentage of Income: 14.3%
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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.
