L.A. Sales Tax Tied For Highest in Country With Chicago; 5 Reasons L.A. Is Cooler Than Windy City

That's the black angel of death, which goes along with taxes

No one likes taxes, but sales taxes are the worst because they tend to be the most regressive -- the less you make, the greater a percentage of your income you pay. Someone who makes $20,000 will likely spend nearly all of it just to survive, for an effective tax rate near 10 percent. But take someone who makes $1 million. Let's say she spends half of it, or $500,000. With a 10 percent sales tax, she's only paying $50,000 in taxes, or 5 percent. Not fair. But anyway, L.A. is way cooler than Chicago. We'll give you five reasons after the jump.

5. Chicago's literary master, Saul Bellow, who blended the colloquialisms of the Chicago street with a vast knowledge of intellectual history to write novels that were gritty while also being important, is dead. We have TMZ.
4. Their elevated train system, which makes it easy to live there without a car and adds to the city's urban charm, is in need of lots of repairs. We don't have a system like that, which means it doesn't need to be repaired.
3. Yes, our flagship newspaper is owned by the dread bankrupt Tribune Co., but at least it's not actually called the Tribune.
2. We don't have to deal with the inconvenience of having the President hail from L.A. (Imagine the traffic if the president lived here and returned home.)
1. Their famed architecture doesn't feature advertisements for important products like Absolut Vodka, whereas we can learn about great products by seeing building wraps from the highway.