Hahaha I laugh so hard when people say this . It shows they have no grasp on the big picture of the real world . You think California has so much wealth because of its awesome safety net ? Or it ' s high taxes ? Maybe it ' s safe space ? California has an insane amount of poverty . The reason the economy is so good is because of the weather bringing a lot of talent to live there . The major corporations followed the talent and moved there . So an abnormal amount of extremely rich companies pay taxes there . This heavily relies on California being in the United States though . The rest of the usa is still where most the consumers are and without being in the same country , the companies would have massive disadvantages . Many would undoubtedly move back to the USA and California would lose major portions of its revenue . Then it would be stuck with a system that was so generous with tax dollars because it had abnormally large tax contributors , except now it would no longer have them . We will see how great it will do then .