Texas has the most regressive state tax system, but charges poor people more than California does its affluent residents, according to the Golden State’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, who further claims that middle-class Texans pay more than residents of his state and Florida.

“Who are you for? Are you just for the one percent or are you for the 98?” Newsom asked in a March 15 post on X. That Newsom, who has all but officially announced his campaign for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, would make such an easily discredited claim suggests a fate awaits him similar to that of former Vice-President Kamala Harris’s 2024 embarrassing bust.

Just Facts Daily (JFD), published by the non-partisan Texas-based Just Facts institute devoted to “publishing facts about public policies and teaching research skills,” likely needed less than a nanosecond of data-driven research to expose the fact that Newsom had it effectively backwards.

“IN FACT, California collects an average of $10,319 in taxes for every person in the state, while Texas collects $5,469, and Florida collects $4,914. Likewise, California collects 13.5% of its economy in taxes, while Florida collects 9.1% and Texas collects 8.6%,” JFD said.

In other words, California’s total tax take on average is almost precisely double that of Texas and a bit more than double that of the Florida’s total levy per person.

But JFD didn’t leave it at that. The researchers dug into the component parts of each of these three states’ tax systems. Here’s what they found:

• “California’s top personal income tax rate is 13.3%, as compared to 0% in Texas and 0% in Florida.
• “California’s property taxes average 2.8% of personal income, as compared to 3.6% in Texas and 2.6% in Florida.
• “California’s top unemployment insurance tax rate is 6.2%, as compared to 6.2% in Texas and 5.4% in Florida.
• “California’s sales tax rate is 7.2%, as compared to 6.2% in Texas and 6.0% in Florida.
• “California’s excise tax on a gallon of gas is 70.9 cents, as compared to 20.0 cents in Texas and 40.3 cents in Florida.”

Interestingly, Newsom could have focused on property taxes where his state is measurably lower than that of Texas and nearly the same as the Florida rate. In addition, the California governor could have pointed to the three states’ unemployment insurance tax rate. For California, the rate is 6.2%, same as the Lone Star state and almost a full percentage point higher than Florida.

On the other hand, Newsom’s California demands an excise tax haul of 70.9 cents per gallon, which is more than three times higher than the 20 cents charged per gallon by Texas and considerably higher than Florida’s 40.3 cents per gallon. The sales tax rate for California is also noticeably higher at 7.2%, versus 6.2% in Texas and 6.0% for Florida.

It turns out that Newsom apparently drew his erroneous comparison based on an analysis published by a left-wing non-profit, the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP), whose work is riddled with errors and misrepresentations, according to JFD’s James Agresti, who is Just Facts’ president and its co-founder.

“The findings of this study have been uncritically cited in prominent venues such as the Washington Post, CBS, the Daily Beast, Newsmax, the Providence Journal, and the New York Times. For instance, the Times reported that ‘according to the study, in 2015 the poorest fifth of Americans will pay on average 10.9 percent of their income in state and local taxes, the middle fifth will pay 9.4 percent and the top 1 percent will average 5.4 percent.’”

“Glaringly absent from the media coverage is how this study uses the same type of deceitful methodology behind claims that the middle class pays a higher federal tax rate than the top 1 percent of income earners, Warren Buffett pays a lower federal tax rate than his secretary, and Mitt Romney pays a lower federal tax rate than the middle class,” Agresti explained.

Those deceitful methodological approaches include, among others, Agresti noted, the use of “calculations that exclude certain taxes, use partial measures of income, or employ both of these charades. The result is that the actual tax rates of the wealthy are understated, while those of others are progressively overstated as their income declines.” Just Facts’ detailed explanation provides additional details on flaws in the ITEP analysis.

As Agresti explained in detail, however, the presence of such analytical flaws didn’t stop The Washington Post, New York Times, and other media outlets from uncritically reporting a claim that an aspiring Democratic presidential candidate thought would advance his campaign to win four years in the Oval Office.