Ok, sales tax here is 13% or 8% provincial and 7% federal, depending on the item bought. So 9% seems fine to me.
Income taxes, on $400k in ON is roughly 45%, and CA would be around 40% -ish, according to the online calculators I found.
Personally I always found food and groceries to be much cheaper in the US in general, but it seems like costs are about the same, milk, chicken, eggs, all seem to be about what I pay here.
Gas prices in CA are significantly cheaper than here, like woah!
Total cost of living in San Francisco is only about 63% higher than the national average. The national median income is only about 60,000. If you told me a person making 100,000-200,000 was middle income in SF I would buy it, not at 2-4 times that. The San Francisco median income is around 110,000. If you make almost quadruple the median income in your metro, you aren’t middle class, anywhere.
Property tax on a $1 million dollar home in Palo Alto averages $660 a month.. Which is lower than the US average (although oddly higher than we pay here in Toronto). And the amount remains utterly trivial compared to the cost of the mortgage.
Actually I really don’t get the way so many Americans piss and moan about high property taxes. Compared to the cost of the property, it’s always a very trivial amount, and a bargain considering all the municipal services it pays for.
As a resident of Silicon Valley, I’m generally offended by the mindless bullshit that prompted this article. If you don’t live here and haven’t tried to buy a house here, what exactly is your opinion worth?
I make low six figures a year and it’s considered entry-level wages. My girlfriend is a Google programmer who makes more than I do, and the two of us together still can’t afford a house in Mountain View, Sunnyvale, or Cupertino. Palo Alto is so far outside our budget that it seems insane even to suggest it.
So get this through your thick heads: $400k/year in Palo Alto is barely enough to buy the cheapest house in this area, and you won’t be going on any vacations for a couple decades after that.
Property taxes are far too low in California, in my opinion (I am a renter in California so I am definitely biased). This is a result of a ballot initiative from 1978 which limited property taxes to 1% of the value of the property as it was valued when it last changed hands (I’m oversimplifying but that’s the gist of it). So people who bought before the housing boom are paying far, far less than what those who buy at today’s insane prices would pay, and even those buying today get a pretty low rate.
As a person living in San Francisco and making money in that range, I’d say it’s enough to live quite comfortably as a single. I imagine supporting a family on it would be a bit tight (though there are certainly people doing it on less!)
Let us leave the money aside for the moment. That these people consider themselves “middle class” means that, on the political spectrum, they don’t feel close to the upper class. Indeed they aren’t: the upper class are people who make at least 100 times that amount of money.
The left should therefore welcome these people, because they are likely to vote for policies redistributing wealth from the top 1% to the rest of the population, which is the real problem. On the contrary, the policy of the 1% has always been to split the working poor from the working not so poor, because that is how they stay at the top.
Gee, that pisses off this better than average driver…
Bona fides: I indicate when changing lanes; I stay in the same lane when turning; I average out the speed in caterpillar traffic; I’m always first away from the lights (a decent gauge of attention and reflexes); I avoid accidents other drivers nearly cause, without causing any myself.
And I don’t mind admitting I’m poor (at least by first world standards).
Well, if you read some of the comments here, you’d have seen that many people were arguing that or something similar. Many of us are aware that buying power is local and contextual and said as much.
But there is something a little wonky about that being the case. It’s not going to be sustainable long term. Other cities/regions of the country are dealing with similar issues or will soon be doing so.
