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California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s repeated claims in recent weeks promoting his state as more tax-friendly than Florida and Texas don’t add up, according to an expert who ran the numbers.
“Texas and Florida are the REAL high-tax states,” Newsom recently posted on X, explaining onstage at SXSW in Austin, Texas that California has the most “progressive tax rates in America” while taking shots at the tax burden in Florida and Texas.
“Your middle class pays more taxes in Texas than our middle class in California,” Newsom said in Texas. “It’s a great mythology, it’s just ‘the richest of the rich come here because they can avoid paying a damn penny.'”
The comments drew pushback from conservatives on social media, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and from Just Facts President James Agresti, who says he looked into a “number of different angles” to determine the “validity” of Newsom’s claims.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom during a bill signing event on Aug. 21, 2025, in Sacramento. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
“I looked at how much is each state taxing each of its citizens on average? So if you look at California, they collect about $10,000 a year in taxes for every person in the state, whereas the figures for Texas and Florida are only about $5,000, or about half as much,” Agresti told Fox News Digital.
“However, California is a higher-income state, so I also looked at it as a percentage of the states’ economies and what I found is that California taxes about 14% of its economy, as opposed to 9% for Texas and Florida.”
Just Facts broke those taxes down in a recent study and found that California imposes some of the highest taxes in the nation, with a top personal income tax rate of 13.3%, while both Texas and Florida have no state income tax.
Property taxes in California account for about 2.8% of personal income,…
