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San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

latimes.com

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Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#81

Post by URSpider94 »

dnautics wrote: post #46
hawkoy wrote: post #6

From: https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2020/11/san-francis... > The tax will levy an extra 0.1% to 0.6% on gross receipts made in San Francisco for companies whose highest paid executive makes 100 times or more its median worker’s salary. The amount levied will increase in 0.1% brackets proportionally to the pay ratio. A company whose highest paid employee earns 200 times more than its median San Francisco wo…

Seems like the solution is directly compensate your CEOs very little and outsource executive services to a third party company that aggregates CEO compensation as a "contracted entity". This company will mostly be paying CEOs, so its median employee salary will be relatively high.

No board of directors anywhere is going to allow this.

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#82

Post by gmadsen »

drak0n1c wrote: post #74
kmtrowbr wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have lived in San Francisco since 2005. Over the time I've lived here, we've had the opposite problem: lots of highly paid tech firms moving into SF. This has changed the nature of San Francisco in a way that many dislike, including me. I was initially attracted to San Francisco because, it was chill, it was beautiful, and it had a lot of eccentric, really interesting people. Many of our good friends had to leave o…

Taxes tend to increase price levels, not reduce them. Costs are passed through to every level.

not 1-1.

a personal wealth tax is not felt or distributed down lane. As long as it is not a company tax, it will not be directly pointed to the buyer.

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#83

Post by Retric »

drak0n1c wrote: post #74
kmtrowbr wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have lived in San Francisco since 2005. Over the time I've lived here, we've had the opposite problem: lots of highly paid tech firms moving into SF. This has changed the nature of San Francisco in a way that many dislike, including me. I was initially attracted to San Francisco because, it was chill, it was beautiful, and it had a lot of eccentric, really interesting people. Many of our good friends had to leave o…

Taxes tend to increase price levels, not reduce them. Costs are passed through to every level.

It’s not that simple. You can’t pass on taxes on profits. If hypothetically charging 57$ maximizes profits then raising prices just lowers profits.

Alternatively, if some aspect of your process like sugar is taxed then companies seek alternatives like corn syrup. That extends to property taxes, executive pay, etc where companies seek alternatives to better utilize resources. Though in the case of salaries that my end up as various executive perks.

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#85

Post by diebeforei485 »

jedberg wrote: post #68

To everyone saying, "this will kill low wage jobs", most companies already outsource their low wage jobs. Their janitors and cooks and maintenance people are already via contractors. Their lowest paid employees are most likely their admin assistants at $50K a year. So basically this is targeting companies whose CEOs make over $50M a year, which is basically Twitter, Pinterest, Google, Facebook, Uber and a few others…

Not all of them. Some baristas and cooks were directly employed by the company, but certainly there is even less incentive to do that now.

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#86

Post by leetcrew »

spinningslate wrote: post #57
rdiddly wrote: post #29

"Critics call the surcharge a blatant attempt at redistribution of wealth..." Um, yes? "Critics call John Travolta 'blatantly an actor, playing parts in movies.'"

that was my reaction too. I don't live in the US, so this is an honest question. Most of the comments here are disparaging about the policy. Is that because: 1. you agree with the principle of addressing wealth polarisation, but don't agree with tax as the mechanism? (in general or the proposed model specifically) 2. you don't agree that increasing wealth polarisation needs to be stopped/reversed? 3. something else?…

I think there are essentially three schools of thought.

1.) wealth/income inequality is inherently wrong, so redistribution is automatically good. private property is theft!

2.) whatever people get paid is theirs, fair and square. therefore redistribution is automatically bad. taxation is theft!

3.) some people are genuinely much more productive than others, and their pay may reflect that. at the same time, people can acquire more than their "fair share" by exploiting vulnerabilities in the system.

from the perspective of 3.), redistribution via tax looks like a dirty hack to mitigate the consequences of a deeper problem. it makes things a little better in the short term, but it doesn't address the root question: why are some people able to capture outsized compensation for their work? but hey, sometimes you have an urgent issue and the quick fix is all you have time to implement.

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#87

Post by diebeforei485 »

djrogers wrote: post #41
dmitrygr wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are many political reasons. i'll list some logistical ones: fire codes? not enough bathrooms? lack of showers?

> not enough bathrooms? lack of showers? Err, plumbers exist, and showers and bathrooms are added to commercial buildings all the time. Nobody is suggesting simply telling people to live in existing office space as-is - converting them would include accounting for these things.

It is not easy to do this in most buildings. There are some examples (eg. 100 Van Ness) but it takes years and really was not as simple as people make it out to be.

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#88

Post by lpolovets »

I wonder how many low margin businesses will leave SF because of this. If I understand it right, this is up to a 0.6% tax on gross receipts. What if a business runs on very thin margins? I can imagine someone like Waste Management ($50b company, $11m in CEO comp, median employee probably makes waaaay less than that) deciding that operating in SF is no longer worth it.

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#89

Post by _jal »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #2

Sounds like business will be booming for temp agencies as well as janitorial and facilities maintenance contractors. Whatever the net positive here is wholly negated by the number of stable long term jobs that are going to go away and be replaced by whoever the body shop chooses to send that day. Working for these middle men really sucks compared to working for whoever the service is being provided for (and I say tha…

How many SF companies have FT in-house janitorial and facilities now?

I've worked for a lot of (admittedly, tech startup) companies, and none of them have.

For that matter, companies I've worked for who needed telephone-answerers or other low-compensation service workers have already spun that off into separate companies, for a similar reason - google '401K highly compensated employee' to see why.

Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

#90

Post by ed25519FUUU »

leetcrew wrote: post #40
hawkoy wrote: post #6

From: https://calmatters.org/california-divide/2020/11/san-francis... > The tax will levy an extra 0.1% to 0.6% on gross receipts made in San Francisco for companies whose highest paid executive makes 100 times or more its median worker’s salary. The amount levied will increase in 0.1% brackets proportionally to the pay ratio. A company whose highest paid employee earns 200 times more than its median San Francisco wo…

sounds like a bunch of full-time roles are about to get converted to contractor positions.

The bottom of the percentile graph will be outsourced to save in taxes for the top percentiles.
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