The reality in California, now benefiting from another technology rally fueled by companies such as Twitter Inc. and a reviving real-estate market, has been different. While job growth slowed in 2013 from a year earlier, employers still expanded their payrolls by 2.6 percent, faster than the 1.7 percent pace in the U.S., according to U.S. Labor Department data compiled by Bloomberg.
“There’s just no evidence that the income tax increases have had any substantial impact on California’s economic growth,” said Christopher Thornberg, founding partner of Beacon Economics LLC, a Los Angeles-based economic consulting firm. “It just is not the primary driving force the way some people think it is.”
The act of tax filing next week won’t change much for high- income Americans, other than to quantify just how much more they are paying.
“The compounding of all of these taxes together got pretty expensive,” said Tim Steffen, director of financial planning at R.W. Baird & Co., a wealth-management firm based in Milwaukee. “It was a real eye-opener as we showed that to a lot of people.”
Steffen said people are so tax-averse that they will make economically unsound decisions -- like holding on to certain investments -- rather than pay higher taxes. That psychology, he said, makes filing season a particularly tough time of year.
“It’s always more painful the day you write that check,” he said. “So that will probably drive up the anger level a bit.”