alt Hacker News>Taxes paid by your employer aren't taxes you pay.
They have the same effect in that they reduce what employees take home in a given labour market. Employees are effectively paying them in the same way that people who buy alcohol/cigarettes effectively pay more in states with higher taxes on those items (even though the taxes are technically paid by the stores).
If CA eliminated all income taxes and instead had employers remit the same effective rate for all salaried employees, employers would just reduce salaries accordingly.
As another example, France's income tax rates cap out around/below some high tax US states. But France is still a comparatively high tax jurisdiction largely because they also impose massive payroll taxes on employers which effectively reduce employee wages.
> >Taxes paid by your employer aren't taxes you pay.
> They have the same effect in that they reduce what employees take home in a given labour market.
Careful, you're thinking like a Marxist (assigning value based on costs ultimately culminating in labor). Under Capitalism, value is assigned based on the meeting point between what people are willing to pay, and what people are willing to sell it for. Some things, like Pokemon cards, are far more valuable than any costs incurred in their production. Other things, like Aunt Betty's utterly disastrous attempts at baked goods, are worth less than then they cost to produce. Payroll taxes only directly effect the purchaser's willingness to pay. Only if we believe that companies are currently paying 100% of the wages they would be willing to pay if they needed to can we call the payroll tax entirely a tax on the worker.