California Gov. Gavin Newsom has spent recent weeks insisting that Texas and Florida are secretly the real high-tax states, and that California's tax burden on the middle class is lighter than what red-state families pay. James Agresti, president of the research organization Just Facts, told Fox News Digital the numbers tell a very different story.
Agresti called Newsom a "master of twisting statistics to paint a picture that is the exact inverse of reality."
The core claim is simple enough. According to Fox News, Newsom posted on X and repeated onstage at SXSW in Austin that middle-class Californians pay less in taxes than their counterparts in Texas and Florida. He framed the states' lack of an income tax as a kind of optical illusion hiding deeper costs.
"Your middle class pays more taxes in Texas than our middle class in California."
Agresti ran the numbers from a number of different angles. Every one of them points in the same direction.
Start with the broadest measure. California collects about $10,000 a year in taxes for every person in the state. Texas and Florida collect roughly $5,000. That's half.
California is a wealthier state, so Agresti also looked at taxes as a share of each state's economy. California taxes about 14% of its economy. Texas and Florida tax about 9%. No matter how you slice it, California extracts more.
Then there are the specific levies. California's top personal income tax rate sits at 13.3%. Texas and Florida have no state income tax at all. California's statewide sales tax is 7.25%, compared to 6.25% in Texas and 6% in Florida. Gas taxes tell an even starker story: California charges 70.9 cents per gallon, Florida charges 40.3 cents, and Texas charges 20 cents.
The one category where Texas edges California is property taxes: 3.6% of personal income versus California's 2.8%. Florida's property tax burden, at 2.6%, is lower than both. Unemployment insurance tax rates are 6.2% in both California and Texas, and 5.4% in Florida.
A WalletHub 2025 analysis ranked California fourth in overall tax burden in the nation, behind only Vermont, New York, and Hawaii. Texas and Florida don't appear anywhere near the top.
Newsom's claims lean heavily on analysis from the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. Agresti has been criticizing ITEP's methodology for over a decade.
"It's information from this group and others like it, by the way, that have misled people to believe that middle-income folks in the United States pay a higher federal tax rate than upper-income folks."
Agresti pointed to a Just Facts survey showing that about 80% of American voters believe that fiction. In reality, as reported by the Congressional Budget Office, the U.S. Treasury, and the center-left Tax Policy Center, middle-income Americans pay an average effective federal tax rate of about 15%, while the top 1% pay about 30%. That includes all taxes, all income, and all loopholes.
ITEP Research Director Carl Davis, in a statement to Fox News Digital after the article's initial publication, offered a partial defense of the broader point. He argued that California has a narrower sales tax base than Texas or Florida, meaning more goods can be purchased tax-free, and that only a small sliver of wealthy families actually pay California's top income tax rate. Davis also cited a Texas Comptroller analysis suggesting the lowest-income families in Texas pay 14% of their incomes toward state taxes.
That figure is worth noting. But it describes the experience of the lowest-income bracket in one state, not the overall tax environment. It does not transform California into a low-tax haven. It is the kind of narrow data point that, isolated from context, does exactly what Agresti warns about: creates a picture that inverts the full reality.
Newsom has also dismissed the narrative that people are fleeing California over taxes and the cost of living. Agresti called that claim fatally flawed.
"Here's the facts: According to his own Secretary of State, every year of Newsom's governorship, more people have moved out of California into other states than have moved from other states into California."
The net loss over the course of his governorship: about 1.5 million more people have left California than moved in from other states.
So, how does Newsom claim population growth? By counting immigrants arriving from other countries. Agresti was blunt about the sleight of hand:
"The issue is not whether people would rather live in California than Mexico, but whether they would rather live in California than other states. And the data clearly show they do not."
When Americans who can choose freely between states vote with their feet, they are walking away from Sacramento. That is not a myth. It is Newsom's own government data.
Newsom has also boasted that California has the fourth-largest economy in the world, having just surpassed Japan's. Agresti identified the methodological fraud buried in that claim.
"He is converting Japanese yen into U.S. dollars using a highly deceptive measure called foreign currency exchange rates. Scholars in this field warn explicitly: You are not to convert GDPs using exchange rates because it inflates the relative sizes of economies that have high prices, as California does."
When the proper adjustment is made, Japan's GDP is 56% larger than California's. Not smaller. Not comparable. More than half again as large.
This is the pattern. Take a real number. Run it through a methodology that professionals in the field explicitly reject. Announce the distorted result on a stage in Austin as though it were a settled fact.
Newsom is not making an academic argument about tax incidence theory. He is running a political campaign against the very idea that governance has consequences. California carries the highest poverty rate of any state in the nation when the cost of living is factored in. Its electricity prices run more than twice the national average. Its residents are leaving for red states in numbers that no amount of creative accounting can obscure.
The governor's answer to all of this is not reform. It is a redefinition. If the taxes are too high, redefine what counts. If the people are leaving, redefine who counts. If the economy is smaller than you claimed, redefine how you measure it.
At some point, the gap between the narrative and the lived experience of actual Californians becomes too wide to bridge with an SXSW keynote. A net loss of 1.5 million residents is not a messaging problem. It is a verdict.