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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

#241

Post by lotsofpulp »

sethammons wrote: post #191
colordrops wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are rules such as Common Ownership or Common Control that prevent that kind of avoidance. I'm sure SF can come up with something similar.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/26/1.414(c)-4

https://healthcareexchange.com/article/common-ownership-what...

http://wkins.com/aca-common-ownership-rules-explained/

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

#242

Post by op03 »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #188

It will work out well fiscally because giant companies will suck it up and pay, but it looks like a bad strategy from a forward-looking point of view. You want to incentivize future growth too, and you want to make sure that 20 years down the line, you have the new FAANGs of the world giving you millions in tax dollars, because history has shown that the largest of companies can eventually die out, and tech is full o…

Cities consistently outlast Kings and Empires.

But to build empire you have to be in denial of that fact.

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

#243

Post by pydry »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #231
xg15 wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they show do nothing about today's inequality because this will get them more taxes in 20 years? (Unless someone makes the same point 20 years in that they should better wait another 20 years)

One thing I'd like to see them do is radically simplify the ability for regular people to start regular businesses. One thing we could do is pick some small industry and run experiments with it. An example might be food trucks. There's a lot of regulations around these today. As a thought experiment we could eliminate all sales tax, special licensing, etc. for food truck companies under a certain size (We don't McDon…

Concentration of market power and lack of risk capital, not regulation, is the primary inhibitor to normal people starting businesses.

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

#246

Post by qppo »

danans wrote: post #235
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #188

It will work out well fiscally because giant companies will suck it up and pay, but it looks like a bad strategy from a forward-looking point of view. You want to incentivize future growth too, and you want to make sure that 20 years down the line, you have the new FAANGs of the world giving you millions in tax dollars, because history has shown that the largest of companies can eventually die out, and tech is full o…

> What this does is, it collects money from today's FAANGs while disincentivizing future startups from starting here. How many startups are there where the executives make 100x to 200x the median employee pay? That only happens via stock-based compensation at public companies. If that's the case, they're not a startup.

Is the tax assessed on options/grants even if there isn't a market to sell them?

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

#247

Post by macinjosh »

yboris wrote: post #228
thrill wrote: post #112

Yeah, that won't have any unexpected effects. U-Haul is 20x what it was 20 years ago. How much higher can it go.

Could you share a bit more context? What happened with U-Haul?

I am not OP but my take is that hordes have been movin out of California to escape from taxes and regulations. Often they leave in a U-Haul, making it a booming business.

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

#248

Post by astine »

core-questions wrote: post #232
dontreact wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that the performance of companies is driven by the CEO much more than the employees. If the Bay Area has great FANG companies because of talented workforce here, then CEOs will gladly take a pay cut to be able to employ the best workers.

> If the Bay Area has great FANG companies because of talented workforce here The talented workforce is there because of the companies. Why would someone deliberately choose to live in San Fran when given the choice of many cleaner, nicer cities with a lower cost of living? I guess if you really like fog and hills

San Francisco is a well known culture hub. The startup industry started source of it in Silicon Valley but shifted north because of the appeal of living in San Francisco.

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

#249

Post by whakim »

ciarannolan wrote: post #218

Brings to mind the last paragraph here (see my comment below for the ending): > By the time of Plato’s death (347 B.C.) his hostile analysis of Athenian democracy was approaching apparent confirmation by history. Athens recovered wealth, but this was now commercial rather than landed wealth; industrialists, merchants, and bankers were at the top of the reshuffled heap. The change produced a feverish struggle for mone…

One thing to keep in mind is that most of our primary sources are incredibly hostile towards the merchant class. (For much of history, the merchant class had an incredible stigma attached to them.)

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

#250

Post by dragonwriter »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #188

It will work out well fiscally because giant companies will suck it up and pay, but it looks like a bad strategy from a forward-looking point of view. You want to incentivize future growth too, and you want to make sure that 20 years down the line, you have the new FAANGs of the world giving you millions in tax dollars, because history has shown that the largest of companies can eventually die out, and tech is full o…

> What this does is, it collects money from today's FAANGs while disincentivizing future startups from starting here.

Does it? Startups probably start out with a fairly small Executive Pay Ratio because they start out without a lot of low-paid grunts, and its already not common for them to open satellite facilities or move HQs for grunt work when they scale out to more jobs where they aren't trying to attract locally-concentrated elite talent. Because its triggered on the ratio between the highest paid managerial employee anywere in the firm and the median pay of employees in the City, it really just adds further incentives to do low-level gruntwork outside of the city, but doesn't seem otherwise to really change the structural incentives much for startups.

OTOH, it does make it more expensive for any widespread organization whose headquarters and elite labor are elsewhere to operate a facility with mostly low-level labor in the City; a tech startup headquartered in the City might never be hit by it even as they scaled up if they are focussed on automation, as they might never have a low-paid workforce. OTOH, retail, etc., outlets, hotels, etc., of firms with highly-paid executives with their main executive and high-paid labor force outside of the city would be hit hard (as far as compared to other firms, I don't think the tax rate is ever high enough to really be "hit hard") by it on their operations in the City.

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