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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

#601

Post by chaostheory »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #574
digitaltrees wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if other states could be blocked from buying one way bus tickets for their homeless citizens and instead be responsible that would help.

This is an urban legend and gets claimed in every major city. San Francisco has great weather, lots of well off people to panhandle from, and treats the homeless relatively better than its neighbors. It really is that simple.

It’s real. There are plenty of articles about it. The cities are playing hot potato with the homeless because there’s no federal program to deal with it. 80% of the homeless get back on their feet in months. It’s only 20% who are chronically homeless. It’s a mental health and drug abuse issue.

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

#602

Post by opportune »

nogabebop23 wrote: post #534
opportune wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know lots of people under 30 in the Bay Area who could have much more than 3 rental properties if they wanted to. Especially outside of the bay area. It's just that living with roommates is pretty frugal, and before the pandemic, it was a good way to save an extra $10k a year living in a more central location. Every single person I know who is a bay area SWE makes enough to afford renting a 1bed apartment in a good…

>> makes enough to afford renting a 1bed apartment in a good area In most cities in the US this is not the definition of wealthy or even well off. living with roommates to save 10K a year does sound like one step above poverty.

Maybe I am just a frugal person, but to me, if you told me I could get a post-tax extra 10k a year switching from a 1bed apartment to a roommate situation I would always take it as long as I could find reasonable people to live with. I was pretty far from poverty when I made that decision in the SF bay area. And again, I just said they could afford a 1bed apartment, not that this was the max they could afford. You're not being charitable with interpreting my reply.

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

#603

Post by flaque »

primitivesuave wrote: post #385
jm_l wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conc…

One number you're missing there is the total homeless population estimated in 2019 to be around 8000 people [1], which works out to around $45k per homeless resident. 1. https://hsh.sfgov.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/2019HIRDRep...

This is a misleading metric.

Say you had a $100k homeless budget, and 100 homeless folks. You’re spending $1k per resident.

But say your program REALLY works, and now you only have 10 homeless folks. Then, your program is spending $10k per resident!

the program didn’t get worse. As your program gets better, you should be spending MORE per resident, not less.

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

#604

Post by smsm42 »

runarberg wrote: post #514
sushid wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, people from all walks of life may end up homeless but I'm tired of hearing stories of my friends being robbed at gunpoint/knifepoint or straight up assaulted for a phone and a wallet. People walk into stores and steal without impunity, shoot up drugs, shit in the middle of a street, etc. It's truly appalling. As far as being homeless goes, the homeless here are free to fuck things up for the rest of us.

Honest question why are you blaming the homeless for fucking up things for the rest of us? In my experience the rich are far more guilty (as a generalized group) of fucking things up for me. The rich have polluted the planet, raised the global temperature up a whole degree. The damage is that now I can’t go outside in late summer, if it doesn’t rain the week before, because the air is poisoned by soot from forest fir…

> The rich are the reason—unless you are one of them—that you are not making significantly more money from your current job

Actually, for a significant part of Bay Area - anybody who is working in a startup or a company that has been a startup (including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc.) "the rich" are the reason they have a job and a salary with which they can afford not being homeless. Who do you think makes up VC capital from which startup investments are made? I don't idealize rich people - as a whole, they have the same percent of assholes and criminals as any other group, and as people with many resources their assholery has an outsized impact sometimes - but claiming "the rich are the reason" for all problems and without them we'd all be paid tons of money of of somewhere magic - is just sheer idiocy. Sorry, I lived in a country where (almost) nobody was rich, at least legally - and it was shitty. I do not recommend it to anybody.

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

#605

Post by opportune »

jordan_curve wrote: post #582
opportune wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as an aside, I don't know the stats for SF, but in Seattle the "invisible" homeless outnumbered the street-homeless 2:1. Street-homeless people tend to cause the most problems and put the most strain on the system, but there are a lot more people sleeping in cars, shelters, temporary housing, and couchsurfing, who are still homeless and need help. I honestly think SF and Seattle need to be tougher on the street-…

Do you have a source for the 2:1 ratio in Seattle? I ask not because I think it’s false, but because I was looking for similar data earlier and couldn’t find it.

Check out page 7 of this: https://regionalhomelesssystem.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/0...

Actually the ratio seems higher if you compare street/outside/tent/encampment/abandoned building vs. the other options.

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

#606

Post by flaque »

victor106 wrote: post #406
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…

I agree. And also in general I am not sure if it makes sense to tax millionaires or billionaires at the city or state. They'll just move some place else. Just ask New York[1]. After NY imposed a tax on the uber rich. All of them moved to Miami and maintain two residences. One in NYC and one in Florida. IF you tax its best to do it at the country level https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/07/nyregion/wealth-tax-budge...

This isn’t a tax on the CEO’s individually, it’s a tax on the businesses that have high paid CEOs.

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

#607

Post by opportune »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #578
digitaltrees wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many billion dollar start ups came out of the Austin ecosystem? SF is expensive because it is productive. It’s producing wealth so prices go up. If you want to raise money, recruit talent SF adds value which is paid for with hire expenses. I would rather own equity in a high growth start up than 3 rental houses; at least from a growth perspective.

> I would rather own equity in a high growth start up than 3 rental houses; at least from a growth perspective. But that isn't the choice, the choice is between three rental houses and a maybe 1 in 20 chance of owning equity in a high growth startup that may or may not IPO in the next 15 years.

That's a false dichotomy. A startup engineer could easily afford three rental properties in most flyover states after 8 years of working from their salary alone.

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

#608

Post by austincheney »

Several of the comments here entertain the idea you can get wealthy in the Bay Area working working for an established company, not equity. I have never understood the math.

Let’s say you earn an outrageous salary working for a FAANG of about $450,000. That is about 3x the equivalent where I live for the same work but taxes are substantially higher and housing costs 6-10x. Numerically it doesn’t make any sense when the current value of my house (after doubling in value) is barely the downpayment of a house in the valley. Apartments are also ridiculously expensive and I would want to live in a tiny apartment with kids (my own, not roommates).

Then the other argument is that the valley is where the jobs are. My experience is that if you are an experienced and half competent software engineer there are plenty of jobs in every major metro.

So if I already have a high paying job and own real estate what is the pull to move to the Bay Area?

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

#609

Post by titzer »

rcpt wrote: post #587
titzer wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would just become another variable in pricing land. It would actually slow down appreciation because taxes would have to be priced into every transaction. You can't borrow against collateral you don't have, so lenders would obviously calculate the appreciation taxes due if they need to foreclose.

But would the lenders adjustments offset the huge rise in prices from people not selling? Prop 13 already locks people in. With this law they'd have an even bigger reason to bank land forever.

I don't follow that. Suppose the tax was 100%. Real estate would effectively never appreciate, so no one would hoard it. If the tax is 0%, then it's a completely "free" market. Anything between the two just reduces the ROI.

Since a high ROI in the short term promotes speculation (and not development), it seems like this would reduce speculation and the likelihood of bubbles forming.

Of course that's a ridiculously oversimplified view. There are a zillion different ways to stack this, which is what would happen in any case. To spur development and not just buy-and-hold, the law might be written to exempt certain kinds of improvement costs.

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

#610

Post by ovao »

digitaltrees wrote: post #569
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…

We should talk and listen. They don’t want to be homeless. They want something else. What? Provide that.

In many cases? Drugs.
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