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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

#311

Post by diebeforei485 »

xg15 wrote: post #193
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?

I would recognize that taxing pay ratio is a ridiculous concept because temp agencies can be used (and already are used) for lowest-wage jobs like janitors. These are not independent contractors, these are W2 employees of a temp firm.

What I would do instead is tax highly paid executives. This does not have the side-effect of making companies only use temp firms (as described above) if they need a barista or receptionist.

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

#312

Post by heavyset_go »

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.

Prices are not determined by costs, but what the market will bear.

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

#314

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

I suspect that this would collect a lot more money from today's Hiltons and Marriots than FAANGs; its not like FAANGs employ a lot of people at bottom-of-the-barrel wages in SF.

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

#315

Post by jseliger »

kmtrowbr wrote: post #70
umeshunni wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely, this will just result in businesses continuing to leave San Francisco. The pandemic has given most companies a good reason to do so already and my bet is on most of them not returning to their overpriced San Francisco headquarters when this is eventually over.

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…

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,

San Francisco's huge, number one problem has been and still is that it makes building new housing illegal: https://techcrunch.com/2014/04/14/sf-housing/.

Increase supply and prices will eventually fall. This is not a complicated problem and the relationship between supply, demand, and price has been known since the time of Adam Smith. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16704501

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

#316

Post by heavyset_go »

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.

No they aren't. Part of being rich is not having to worry about money, which is why plenty of rich people live in cities, states and countries that tax them more: the benefits of doing so outweigh the costs.

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

#317

Post by fuzxi »

rbranson wrote: post #301
macspoofing wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we've had the opposite problem: lots of highly paid tech firms moving into SF. Quite the problem ... the kind of problem that multitudes of cities and regions in the world are desperately trying to recreate. >This has changed the nature of San Francisco in a way that many dislike, including me. This is where progressives don't live up to their name. The nature of cities is constant change. Meanwhile the activists ar…

> The fact that you're white and a tech worker isn't the problem. It's that you had the opportunity to move to San Fransciso for work due to the tech boom, and now you're trying to pull the ladder up so others cannot do the same. This is quite the ad hominem. I may have missed it, but I'm not sure where OP said anything about density or housing. Is there something wrong with not wanting the city that you love to be i…

>Is there something wrong with not wanting the city that you love to be invaded by the human version of a swarm of locusts?

He is, by his own admission, one of those locusts.

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

#318

Post by cheriot »

burkaman wrote: post #303
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 makes you think the very slight disincentive to future startups outweighs the hundreds of millions in health services funding? Remember that healthcare has a compounding positive effect, because healthy people have an easier time contributing to society, and unhealthy people are more likely to need public services.

It's dis-incentivizing future growth to make up for people and companies that barely pay any tax at all. The only thing this subsidizes are long time land owners.

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

#319

Post by brigade »

thrill wrote: post #265
yboris wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In a society that has reasonably established freedom of movement, which the US Constitution does fairly well, sufficiently onerous policies, where the sufficiently part is decided by those who bear the payment burden and not by the levier, eventually result in the target actively deciding to exercise that right to just leave. It's a big country, and there are many nice places in it where a decent life can be lived wi…

...why? The last 4x increase was 2012-2015, then it's been pretty stagnant since then. So has inter-state movement been stagnant for the last 5 years?

2006-2011 was the housing crash and recovery; it doesn't seem like an outlier from the overall stock market. Before that, it collapsed from 2000 to 2003, then gained 5x over its previous highs from 2003-2006.

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

#320

Post by burlesona »

GhostVII wrote: post #309

San Francisco's solution to everything seems to be to just keep raising taxes, and throwing money at things which don't work. At some point you have to realize that more money isn't always the solution, you actually have to fix your beurocracy. It's insane to me that the city with so many rich people and incredibly valuable companies is such a mess, your telling me that a small city with an incredibly wealthy populat…

It's much harder to repeal laws, remove committees, stop wasteful procedures etc. than it is to introduce those things.

This is a big problem at all levels of government, but particularly in California where the voters can (and do) directly create policies and programs via propositions.

If we were half as good at removing unhelpful laws and programs as we were at creating them, we'd all be a lot happier.

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