Newsom’s claim Texas and Florida are the ‘real high tax states’ picked apart by expert: ‘Fatally flawed’

California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s repeated claims in recent weeks that his state is more tax-friendly than Florida and Texas do not make sense, according to an expert who has studied the numbers.

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

“Your middle class pays more taxes in Texas than our middle class does 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 dime.’

Comments attracted attention reaction from conservatives on social media, including from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and from Just Facts President James Agresti, who said he looked at “several different angles” to determine the “validity” of Newsom’s claims.

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“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 person in the state, whereas the figures for Texas and Florida are only about $5,000, so about half that,” Agresti told Fox News Digital.

“But California is a higher-income state, so I also looked at it as a percentage of their state economy and found that California taxes about 14% of its economy, while Texas and Florida tax 9%.”

Just Facts recently reduced these taxes to work 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 account for approximately 2.8% of personal income; this rate is slightly lower than Texas’ 3.6% and closer to Florida’s 2.6%; but measured as a share of home values, California’s rates are generally lower than both states, although in other tax areas California is substantially more onerous.

The state’s unemployment insurance tax rate compares to 6.2% in Texas but is higher than Florida’s 5.4%. California also has a higher statewide sales tax at 7.2%; It is 6.2% in Texas and 6.0% in Florida. Drivers in California also face significantly higher fuel taxes; they pay 70.9 cents per gallon; That’s more than three times the 20 cents in Texas and well above Florida’s 40.3 cents.

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Wallethub 2025 analysis The ranking of US states by overall tax burden showed that California ranked 4th overall, after Vermont, New York and Hawaii. California collects significantly more than either state in state and local taxes on a per capita basis, according to data from the Tax Foundation.

Data is at the heart of the problem, Agresti said, suggesting that Newsom is likely withdrawing from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), which is widely used by mainstream news outlets and experts but which he says is “fatally flawed” because it “does not account for all types of income or all taxes.”

Agresti has been opposing ITEP’s methodology for over a decade and explains: 2015 post He said the group “uses a partial measure of income in almost 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 impose a broad-based personal income tax that disproportionately benefits high-income earners.

To make up the difference, these states rely more heavily on sales, excise and property taxes, which tend to take a larger share of income from lower-income households. California, by contrast, uses a highly progressive income tax system that puts more of the burden on top earners and helps offset regressive taxes at the lower tiers of the income ladder.

But critics say the framing reflects only part of the picture because it focuses on California’s tax burden by income group rather than its overall tax environment, which remains far more burdensome for top earners, investors and many businesses.

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

“In fact, a poll by Just Facts found that about 80% of voters in America believe this fiction, even though the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. Treasury, and the center-left Tax Policy Center say that middle-income Americans pay an effective federal tax rate of around 15% on average, while upper-income earners, or the top 1%, pay a rate of about 30%. By the way, that includes all taxes, all income, all tax loopholes, basically all taxes paid divided by all income earned or received.” is the value obtained.”

Fox News Digital has reached out to ITEP for comment.

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

“The facts are this: According to his own Secretary of State, every year during Newsom’s term as governor, more people moved from California to other states than from other states moved to California,” Agresti said. published data “In fact, 1.5 million more people left California during his governorship than moved there,” he said on his website.

“So how does Newsom get his claim and his evidence? Well, he’s looking at total population growth, which is dominated by immigrants from other countries. The question isn’t whether people will choose to live in California over Mexico, it’s whether people will choose to live in California over other states. And the data clearly shows that they don’t.”

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

Newsom was too data touting It shows that California now has the fourth largest economy in the world, surpassing Japan; Agresti also objected to this and described it as “fiction” in his opinion. study of numbers.

“That’s the fatal flaw in his work right there,” Agresti said. “It converts Japanese yen into U.S. dollars using a highly deceptive measure called exchange rates. Scholars in this field clearly warn that you should not convert GDPs using exchange rates because this inflates the relative sizes of economies with high prices, as California does. When you look at the proper way to transfer and account for these exchange rates, you find that Japan’s GDP is 56% larger than California’s.”

Additionally, Agresti stated: data This shows that California has a higher poverty rate than any other state in the country, and electricity prices 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 at the same time there are a lot of side effects of Newsom’s policies that have made 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.

Fox News Digital’s Bradford Betz contributed to this report