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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

#461

Post by xyzzyz »

didibus wrote: post #414
primitivesuave wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in the Tenderloin in 2013 and it has actually improved a lot since marijuana was legalized and public restrooms added in - back then, there was a guy on every street corner trying to sell you something, and certain alleyways/corners where there was daily cleaning for piles of human waste. It's become much less dangerous but still quite depressing to walk through. I started talking to people living on t…

> or leave the city I would like it that we can as a society find ways to help homeless with their issues and manage their lives in a way that isn't just each city tossing them out. That said, I'm not against someone's honest decision to say, well I don't know how, and in the mean time, I want them out of sight so kick them out. But, and this is the but I feel is never discussed by those who propose that solution is…

Jailing them would actually be cheaper than what they currently do, as long as they are jailed outside of California, which spends much more per prisoners than other states.

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

#462

Post by Consultant32452 »

hmahncke wrote: post #453
Consultant32452 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Proposition H (passed) was designed to do exactly that: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-s-Propositio...

I don't think you're getting it. I'm talking about radical deregulation and exemption from taxation. Prop H reduces the time to get a permit. I'm talking about not needing a permit. I'm talking about no business taxes, no licenses, no health department inspections, nothing. If you've got a grill you can put it up and sell hot dogs on any private property that gives you permission.

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

#463

Post by mrits »

norswap wrote: post #428
mrits wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can purchase a 5K sqft lot outside of Austin for $2,200 and we still have a growing homeless problem. I'd look more into providing mental health, relocation, and incentives to stay off heavy drugs.

Surely that number is not right - probably lacking two digits?

I always hear bay area friends tell me how it's not that bad there if you have room mates. Mean while the engineers here in their 30s are collecting income from their 3rd rental property already.

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

#464

Post by bhupy »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #460
bhupy wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not quite relevant, because we already tax land appreciation in the US today, it's just the capital gains tax. The capital gains tax is also low because (in theory) we want to incentivize investment in the name of growth. There's no reason why we ought to apply the same incentive in favor of investment in real asset growth. A Land Appreciation Tax is just a capital gains tax just on real estate. In fact, LVT would be…

Why capital gains tax rate is lower [..] The justification for a lower tax rate on capital gains relative to ordinary income is threefold: it is not indexed for inflation, it is a double tax, and it encourages present consumption over future consumption. ... Finally, a capital gains tax, like nearly all of the federal tax code, is a tax on future consumption.[..]

Yup, that too. It’s another consideration that I don’t think ought to be made for land appreciation. In fact, because it doesn’t account for inflation, for the longest holders of land, a high LAT functions like a very mild LVT in practice, while also neutralizing the attractiveness of land as an investment vehicle in general.

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

#465

Post by LanceH »

cam0 wrote: post #393
xienze wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Does SF really need investment from FAANGs? SF was a pretty awesome city before the tech boom of the 90's + 00's, and currently none of the FAANGs have a major office presence here... FB in Menlo, Apple in Cupertino, Amazon in Seattle, Netflix in Los Gatos, and Google in MV.

They certainly view the money brought in by FAANGs as theirs.

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

#466

Post by kmtrowbr »

macspoofing wrote: post #158
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…

>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 kind of problem that multitudes of cities and regions in the world are desperately trying to recreate

I always tell people that, "it is a nice problem to have." Totally agree with you.

But it is still a problem nonetheless. It's fair enough to raise taxes to try to solve some of the problems which hugely successful businesses have created by displacing people.

Building more housing: YES, more dense housing: YES, programs for homeless people: YES -- on the back of such success, we should have all the money we need to maintain San Francisco.

YES my presence is symptomatic of the problem but, being self-aware, I try to address that by genuinely loving San Francisco, paying more taxes myself when I am asked to do so, participating in local art and culture, and not treating it like a transient place but rather my home and a treasure.

Regarding your statement that I'm trying to block others' advancement: proposition L is about taxing companies whose CEOs make 100-600x more than the median at their company. I am not hurting other regular folks by supporting this, furthermore I'm not even hurting the CEOs (they make 100x more than normal folks). If you benefit from society to the point where you're the leader of such a company, for goodness sake, give a little back gracefully, that's progressive taxation and it has been one of the foundations of our society since 1862.

SF is a liberal, expensive place, because supporting such population density and giving everyone a high quality of life is hard and requires work and money. If we categorically define all taxation as bad, we lose all basis for collective action. America is getting lost in the labyrinth of its own arguments.

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

#467

Post by tmh88j »

dfinninger wrote: post #432
norswap wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely that number is not right - probably lacking two digits?

You can get out of Austin pretty quick. 30 mins in some directions can get you out of the metro area. Also, 5k sqft is 1/10 of an acre. That said, I don’t know anything about land prices in Texas right now.

>You can get out of Austin pretty quick. 30 mins in some directions can get you out of the metro area. Also, 5k sqft is 1/10 of an acre.

During the normal busy hours in which people commute, no way. I can only hope all the construction going on along 183 will speed things up on the East side. The 290/71 junction is another nightmare during rush hour.

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

#468

Post by neilparikh »

The fundamental problem is California is Prop 13. They can try to patch it up however they want these one off measures, but until you address the massive amount of wealth extraction going on by the landed class, all these attempts for improvements will just flow right into land. This principle was discovered 200 years ago:

> When there is no accessible rent-free land, any improvements in the condition of society, be they in the form of civilizational progress or local improvement, are recaptured in the form of higher land values, and the leftover wages after rent is paid will tend towards subsistence, as described by David Ricardo's Law of Rent.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rack-rent

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

#469

Post by typ »

bhupy wrote: post #450
typ wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they are different. Unlike LVT, an appreciation tax is a transaction tax, which can be shifted to the purchasers.

I would argue that as a transaction tax, it reduces the demand for the land. The net effect is the same: curbing land speculation.

A transaction tax does not reduce the demand. It reduces the quantity of transactions that matches the demand and supply. That means it adds friction to the reallocation of resources for more efficient use. It literally encourages hoarding. That is even worse than speculation.

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

#470

Post by mbesto »

norswap wrote: post #428
mrits wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can purchase a 5K sqft lot outside of Austin for $2,200 and we still have a growing homeless problem. I'd look more into providing mental health, relocation, and incentives to stay off heavy drugs.

Surely that number is not right - probably lacking two digits?

Live in Austin. Yes that's BS, unless you're talking about a 5.5k sf lot out carved out of a rural farmland (which are plentiful right outside of Austin).
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