Probegt21: Living in CA, I feel the pain of a 8% sales tax (8.25% last year), but before you start talking about paying people to use drugs, have a thousand children, and not work, look at the relative size of CA, especially Los Angeles, compared to any major city in OH. I work as a DBA and SA, but I will use a DBA's salary in my examples. These numbers were taken off salary surveys from Kforce.com. The average salary for a DBA in Cinncinnati is 71K, maxing out at 81K, in Cleveland it is 72K, maxing out at 82K. These were the highest numbers of any major city in OH. In comparison, in Los Angeles, the same position averages at 79K, maxing out at 90K. And if you look at San Jose, the average for a DBA is 82K, maxing out at 94K. So you see, although we have a 2.5% higher sales tax than OH, on average, we make an average of 10K per year. That should justify it a bit.