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San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses
371–380 of 754 posts
Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses
#372A lot of people here misinterpreting the CEO tax —- it applies to revenue made within San Francisco, and is not dependent on the location of the company. So no, it should not impact the decision of a founder to base their company in SF.
The doubling of transfer tax on property over $10m however... that has a very real impact on a founder who has already made some money.
Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's funny/sad that people act like "redistribution of wealth" is a scary concept. Wealth is constantly being redistributed by commerce, and mostly it is being redistributed to the people with the biggest piles already. Overpricing products, underpaying workers, lotteries, taxes, rents, and investor/borrower arrangements are all mechanisms to shift wealth around.
A trade between two parties is not a redistribution of wealth . If I buy a car for $10,000, then I now have a car worth $10,000, and the seller has $10,000. Wealth was not redistributed, we’re both where we started.
When the price isn't optimal, which it never really is, it's not an equal exchange of value.
The typical tautology toted that if you spend X then it's worth X is just willfully missing the point that there's such thing as a bad deal. When you build bad deals into a system such that some group of people only has bad deals as options, you are able to extract wealth from them. That's what life is for many people -- a series of bad deals with no other options.
Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses
#374This 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…
How exactly will SFO know how much the CEO's compensation is? And maybe companies can get rid of the CEO title and just call her Chairman of the Executive Council or something?
Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses
#375It 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.
I think it’s gonna disincentivize FAANGs from making future investments in the city. This is BAAAAD timing for a tax hike like this, coming off tech companies doing a seven month experiment in whole-company WFH, and finding out it’s working pretty well.
Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses
#376San 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…
I think this is a common line of thinking that doesn't actually reflect the reality of how much the city is spending per year.
SF's spending in 2019 was 12b dollars (roughly $12,000 per resident).
Of that, 1.6b went to MTA ($1600 per resident, or 13% of total spending) and 360m went to addressing homelessness ($360 per resident, or 3% of total spending)
Comparatively, SF's GDP was 500b (500,000 per resident).
To conclude that we're spending all our money on this and getting no results seems wrong when we're spending so little of our budget, and our budget is so little comparatively to the economic activity.
*(these numbers are from http://openbook.sfgov.org/portalpagehelp.html#sfopenbook 2019 spending)
Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses
#377Earlier 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…
>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…
I have never seen a high density city have low rents. Mumbai, Hong Kong, London, NYC. Is there any factual and proven example of a city that has increased density and housing became affordable and cheaper as a result of more units?
Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses
#378This 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.
Haven't read the law, but if the impact is large enough wouldn't some companies think about outsourcing their decision making to a different company? I'm sure the lawyers can come up with an agreement that in day to day operations is the same as the management team being employees but that doesn't trigger the extra tax because the decision makers aren't really employees. You just bifurcate the company into two separate companies, the highly paid people and everyone else.
Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 empl…
That makes it even more unlikely that there will be much revenue at all generated by this tax. Seems like the beneficiaries of this new plan will be tax accountants and lawyers creating new complicated business structures to bypass the tax...
Re: San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses
#380Earlier 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 find it interesting that you frame income inequality as "wealth polarisation." Are you implying a bimodal distribution of some sort? My personal theory of "inequality" is that it isn't necessarily a bad thing. A distribution of income levels will always have a long right tail as you cannot make negative income but there is no theoretical limit to the maximum income. If all wages grow by the same relative amount, yo…
> According to this theory, as I understand it, you can't have the differences among people be too great because it will cause too much power imbalance and resentment and eventually the masses will rise up and destroy the system from within.
You shouldn't think of the destruction of the system from within as the problem. Some might fear that, but afterall, its unlikely that the people without power would beat those that have it.
The problem is the power zero sum game in itself. Wealth and power are both ways to gather even more wealth and power. In a simple society without a government you could simply use the power to buy weapons and soldiers to coerce the wealth of others. In our society you can use power to shape the rules more favorably for your own group.
As the wealth ratio of one group converges to 100%, the other groups have gradually less influence, unless allowed by those in power because of ideology or their good hearts.
Either you see this as fine and natural, or your ideology prefers everyone to have some amount of freedom over their own lives.
In the later case you may look at ways to reduce the wealth and power inequality, by weeding out rules particularly favorable to the powerful, or by trying to spread wealth more evenly.