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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

#191

Post by sethammons »

colordrops wrote: post #144
cody3222 wrote: post #121

This raises some interesting questions / side effects: 1) Companies may now have a direct incentive to have their lowest income earners be outsourced/contracted out to boost the median pay amount. 2) It was smart of them to include compensation such as stock options. However if a city starts to expect this income, it will all go away in recessions when CEO's stock options are not valuable. ie more money to the city i…

CEOs are all just going to move out of San Francisco.

or just use hollywood accounting. You have a parent company with high paid employees. You have a separate company with low paid employees. Or move. Or change title.

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

#192

Post by danans »

leetcrew wrote: post #86
spinningslate wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ca…

> from the perspective of 3.), redistribution via tax looks like a dirty hack to mitigate the consequences of a deeper problem.

Scenarios 1 and 2 don't exist in the real world. They are just theoretical models.

Every law is a "dirty" hack, because the deeper problem is the nature of humans - which is to hoard privilege, wealth, power, and security - and the way that influences their societies.

Almost every non natural constraint civilization has imposed on humans has been to either support one group's hold on power and security (i.e primogeniture in feudal societies, taxes imposed on non-believers in the state religion) or the opposite: to redistribute power and security across the broader population (Magna Carta, The New Deal, Social Security / Medicare in the US).

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

#193

Post by xg15 »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #91

This is a terrible law. How exactly do you measure the compensation of the CEO of Ikea (moving into SF soon at 6th and Market), Adidas, DJI, Atlassian, Spotify etc? Exchange rates fluctuate a lot and stock based compensation is tricky.

What would you do instead?

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

#194

Post by diebeforei485 »

suyash wrote: post #170

How do they determine that, does the CEO has to be a SF resident or the company's HQ has to be SF based?

Neither. It's just the CEO's compensation (no idea how they compute this, given global exchange rates and stock options) vs the median pay of SF-based employees.

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

#195

Post by bradlys »

shuckles wrote: post #181
colordrops wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CEOs are all just going to move out of San Francisco.

The tax doesn't care about where the CEO lives. It applies to any company that does business in San Francisco which has a CEO that meets the criteria.

And to be clear, it's only on business that is done in San Francisco. Essentially, it's going to turn into a sales tax for SF.

> 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 worker will get a extra 0.2% charge on its gross receipts. For companies whose CEO makes 300 more, the charge jumps to 0.3% and son on. The tax caps at 0.6%, and only companies with gross receipts over $1.17 million will be targeted.

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

#196

Post by derision »

jefftk wrote: post #142
thursday0987 wrote: post #134

does this target only CEOs? what about COOs, CTOs, and other C-level executives? Board members?

highest paid executive makes 100 times or more its median worker’s salary

2 months from now: nation's first executiveless company

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

#197

Post by xg15 »

cody3222 wrote: post #124

This raises some interesting questions / side effects: 1) Companies may now have a direct incentive to have their lowest income earners be outsourced/contracted out to boost the median pay amount. 2) It was smart of them to include compensation such as stock options. However if a city starts to expect this income, it will all go away in recessions when CEO's stock options are not valuable. ie more money to the city i…

The lowest income earners that can easily be outsourced are very likely already outsourced.

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

#198

Post by stevehawk »

ljm wrote: post #180
rglullis wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, let the city collect taxes from all the woke millenials who are neck-deep in student debt and the homeless...

Or, move some of the obscene wealth away so the residents aren't gentrified out of existence, like they already have been? It won't just be CEOs, it'll be all the software engineers and the like too.

and five years from now i get to hear how it is everyone else's fault that real estate property prices fell in san francisco, which destroyed people's equity and retirement plans.

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

#199

Post by dragonwriter »

offtop5 wrote: post #165

Feels like a great way to encourage companies to leave the state. I left California many years ago. Every single part of my life is much better. Fiscally , romantically, mentally. SF over values how essential location is. With Covid it's clear remote work is the future, base the company out of Delaware and go full remote

> Feels like a great way to encourage companies to leave the state.

Well, leave the City and County of San Francisco, maybe. But it wasn't that long ago that SF proper wasn't even considered part of Silicon Valley and the associated tech hub, anyway, though it was close enough that a lot of the conferences, etc., were there. And most of the big SV firms still aren't actually in SF.

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

#200

Post by diebeforei485 »

knappe wrote: post #179
Hydraulix989 wrote: post #167

Don't CEOs only take $1 in salary anyways to keep their income taxes as low as possible and optimize for long-term capital gains through stock compensation instead?

Please at least try and read the article before commenting. "Under the measure, gross receipts and CEO compensation will include money made from stock options, bonuses, tax refunds, and property, a caveat seen by many as a way to target the tech sector where CEOs are often compensated in non-salaried bonuses."

It's still a valid point that stock-based compensation is not easy to compute. RSU's might be, but options are not.
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