title:  California May Stop Paying Taxes To Federal Government After Trump Threatens To Defund The State (DETAILS)
text: In a recent interview with Fox News, Trump said that California is  out of control  for advancing legislation to provide statewide sanctuary for immigrants and keep law enforcement from cooperating with federal authorities in enforcing Trump s many anti-immigrant measures. Trump told Fox that he will take away every penny that California receives from the federal government.The state of California has one of the ten largest economies in the world. Not only is it a giant among states, competing with the economies of some of the most affluent countries worldwide, but it is one of the few states that pays more into the federal Treasury than it receives in government funding. It would be a huge mistake to put the state of California in a position that legislators may decide to stop paying taxes altogether, but Donald Trump seems determined to do just that because, well, he s an idiot. If we have to, we ll defund,  he said.  We give tremendous amounts of money to California. Thanks to the state s liberal policies, California has outpaced the rest of the nation on job growth and had a gross state product of 2.46 trillion in 2015, placing it sixth behind the United Kingdom in world economies (ranked by Gross Domestic Product) and 11th in the world ranked by cost of living.In other words, California would be fine without the federal money it receives if the state stopped paying taxes to the federal government. Officials are currently looking into doing exactly that if Trump follows through on his threat to take federal funding from the state. California could very well become an organized non-payer,  if Trump follows through on threats to punish cities and states that do not comply with requests to turn over Jews undocumented immigrants to Trump s goons, a former speaker of the state Assembly told KPIX 5 on Sunday.  They could recommend non-compliance with the federal tax code. I don t want to defund the state or city, I don t want to defund anybody, I want to give them the money they need to properly operate a city or a state,  Trump says, but  if they re going to have sanctuary cities we may have to do that   certainly that would be a weapon. Ir would be a weapon, but the federal government needs California s money more than the state needs funding from the government. This fact alone is enough to virtually assure that lawmakers will choose to defund Trump rather than violate their conscience and hand over people Trump has deemed  undesirable. Looks like Trump s threat has been called. It s time to find out if he is really stupid enough to try this kind of stunt.Read more:Featured image via Getty Images (Drew Angerer)