Key Newsom claim about California vs red state taxes shredded by expert

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s repeated claims in recent weeks that his state is more tax-friendly than Florida and Texas don’t hold water, according to an expert who has analyzed the numbers.

“Texas and Florida are the REAL high-tax states,” Newsom recently posted on

“Your middle class pays more taxes in Texas than our middle class in California,” Newsom said in Texas. “It’s a big mythology, it’s just that ‘the richest of the rich come here because they can avoid paying a damn penny’.”

The comments attracted decline of conservatives on social media, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Just Facts President James Agresti, who says he looked at “a number of different angles” to determine the “validity” of Newsom’s claims.

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California Governor Gavin Newsom during a bill signing event August 21, 2025 in Sacramento. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

“I looked at how much each state taxes each of its citizens on average? So if you look at California, they collect about $10,000 a year in taxes for every resident in the state, whereas the numbers for Texas and Florida are only about $5,000, about half that amount,” Agresti told Fox News Digital.

“However, California is a higher income state, so I also looked at this as a percentage of the states’ economies and found that California taxes about 14% of its economy, compared to 9% for Texas and Florida.”

Just Facts analyzed these taxes in a recent study and found that California imposes some of the highest taxes in the country, with a top personal income tax rate of 13.3%, while Texas and Florida have no state income tax.

Property taxes in California are about 2.8% of personal income, slightly lower than Texas at 3.6% and close to Florida’s 2.6%. Although measured as a proportion of home values, California’s rates are generally lower than both states, but in other tax areas California is significantly more burdensome.

The state’s UI tax rate matches Texas’s at 6.2%, but is higher than Florida’s (5.4%). California also has a higher statewide sales tax, at 7.2%, compared to 6.2% in Texas and 6.0% in Florida. California drivers also face significantly higher gas taxes, paying 70.9 cents per gallon, more than triple Texas’s 20 cents and well above Florida’s 40.3 cents.

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A Wallethub 2025 analysis The ranking of American states according to their overall tax burden places California 4th, behind Vermont, New York and Hawaii. Per capita, California also collects significantly more in state and local taxes than either state, according to Tax Foundation data.

At the heart of the problem is the data, Agresti says, demonstrating that Newsom is likely moving away from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which Agresti says is widely used by mainstream media and pundits but is “fatally flawed” because “it doesn’t take into account all forms of income and all taxes.”

Agresti has denounced ITEP’s methodology for over a decade, explaining in a post 2015 that the group “uses a partial measure of income in virtually all of its studies” and relies “on calculations that exclude certain taxes.”

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ITEP’s analysis focuses on how tax burdens are distributed across income groups rather than overall tax levels. The group argues that states like Texas and Florida appear “low-tax,” largely because they do not levy large-scale personal income taxes, a structure that disproportionately benefits high earners.

To make up the difference, these states rely more on sales, excise and property taxes, which tend to take a larger share of income from low-income households. California, in contrast, uses a highly progressive income tax system that places a heavier burden on higher earners and helps offset regressive taxes lower down the income scale.

Critics, however, say the framework only reflects part of the picture because it focuses on the tax burden by income group rather than the overall tax climate, where California remains far more burdensome for high earners, investors and many businesses.

“It was information from this group and others like it that led people to believe that middle-income people in the United States pay a higher federal tax rate than high-income people,” Agresti said.

“In fact, a survey by Just Facts found that about 80 percent of American voters believe this fiction, even though the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. Treasury, and the center-left Tax Policy Center all say that middle-income Americans pay an average effective federal tax rate of about 15 percent while top earners, or the top 1 percent, pay a rate of about 30 percent. And by the way, that includes all taxes and taxes. income, all tax loopholes, it’s basically all taxes paid divided by all income earned or received.

Fox News Digital has contacted ITEP for comment.

Agresti said Newsom is a “master at distorting statistics to paint a picture that is the exact opposite of reality” and highlighted the governor’s assertion that the exodus of residents due to high taxes is a “myth.”

“Here are the facts: According to his own secretary of state, every year since Newsom was in office, more people have moved from California to other states than from other states to California,” said Agresti, who published the data on its website, said. “In fact, during his tenure as governor, about 1.5 million more people left California than moved in.”

“So how does Newsom get his claims, his evidence? Well, he looks at total population growth, which is dominated by immigrants from other countries. The question is not whether people would prefer to live in California over Mexico, but whether they would prefer to live in California over other states. And the data clearly shows that’s not the case.”

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California Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

Newsom also touted data showing that California now has the world’s fourth-largest economy, just surpassing Japan’s, which Agresti also disputed and called “fiction” based on his review of the numbers.

“That’s the fatal flaw of what he’s doing there,” Agresti said. “It converts the Japanese yen to U.S. dollars using a very misleading measure called the foreign currency exchange rate. Researchers in this field explicitly caution: You should not convert GDPs using exchange rates, because it inflates the relative size of economies that have high prices, as California does. When you actually look at the appropriate way to transfer these exchange rates and account for them, Japan’s GDP is 56% higher than California’s.”

Additionally, Agresti pointed to data that shows California has a higher poverty rate than any other state in the country, as well as electricity prices that are more than twice the national average.

“When you look at California as a whole, it’s one of the highest tax states in the country, and there’s also a lot of fallout from Newsom’s policies that make it one of the most expensive places to live in the entire United States,” Agresti said.

Fox News Digital has reached out to Newsom’s office for comment.

Bradford Betz of Fox News Digital contributed to this report.