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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

#631

Post by jelliclesfarm »

digitaltrees wrote: post #624
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, we can’t do both. Imagine you walk into a theatre thinking it’s going to be a Hitchcock movie. After the 12th minute, they start showing Groundhog Day. They ask you to come back the next day. You return. Again, after the 12th minute, Groundhog Day. Again, they ask you to come back the next day. And they don’t return the money you paid for your ticket. Or a credit. You have to pay for a ticket again. Everyday. Now…

Your response doesn’t show that we can’t do both. We do have the resources and social science knowledge to accomplish both objectives. I don’t really follow your theater analogy, perhaps you can provide an alternate argument so I, and others can understand why you feel that resources are scarce, limited, and the objectives are mutually exclusive.

We don’t have ‘resources’. We have a mechanism for instituting punitive taxes on a minority just because they are wealthy for a spending plan that has no clear path to success.

And who is ‘we’? Peter and Paul want to tax Bob to hand over $$ to Jack and Jill.

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

#632

Post by nvader »

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…

Once, there was a French city planning department that couldn't decide what to do with all the fresh water that they had. So they voted to BURy the WATER, which was CRAzy.

Bur + eau + cracy

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

#633

Post by Talanes »

rmk wrote: post #597
mypalmike wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everyone wants "nice suburban homes" or being a landlord. Many people like city life. It's really that simple.

I agree. A lot of this stuff is a function of age and marital status. Older people tend to get married and have kids, and once that happens they clearly prefer the suburbs. There are many folks who prefer city life, but I bet they would be found in much greater numbers in the 'real' cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Washington D.C... San Francisco just feels like a slightly overgrown town with…

I don't know what exactly you consider "city life," but Los Angeles does not come anywhere close to San Francisco by my definition.

The second-class treatment of public transit over car-driving alone is awful. I don't have to worry about being stranded ANYWHERE in the bay because I didn't finish what I was doing by 5pm, unlike my last trip to Santa Monica.

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

#634

Post by mrits »

kortilla wrote: post #618
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.

> You can purchase a 5K sqft lot outside of Austin for $2,200 and we still have a growing homeless problem. But not actually near Austin enough for it to be a sane place to live and commute to Austin from (especially if you depend on public transit).

30 mins east of downtown is farmland

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

#635

Post by chii »

arcticbull wrote: post #617
rcpt wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily a San Franciscan figured it all out over one hundred years ago so we don't have to wonder about this: > THE GREAT PROBLEM IS SOLVED. We are able to explain social phenomena that have appalled philanthropists and perplexed statesmen all over the civilized world. We have found the reason why wages constantly tend to a minimum, giving but a bare living, despite increase in productive power: > As productive power…

Housing is literally exclusively a supply and demand problem. If you want rent to go down, allow more building. End of story. There's actually nothing else to it. Lower property values caused by an increase in supply will yield lower rents because rents are generally indexed to mortgage rates which are indexed to property values. The problem is twofold. 1. Americans view property as an investment while also wanting i…

> non-voters ... Landowners tend to be older, established voters ... city council panders to [voters]

surprise, surprise, if you don't vote and assert your civic duty and rights, you don't get included in the process to decide the direction of society.

> view property as an investment while also wanting it to be affordable. These are mutually exclusive.

they aren't - investment is supposed to increase the efficiency of production, thus increasing the availability of said product. The issue here is that land is scarce, and can be made more scarce by various laws. Building/construction costs have decreased somewhat, but the major cost is the land, and lack of density leads to lower supply.

> Anything other than permitting tons of new building is at best a band-aid over a hole in the dam.

yes, this is exactly it. However the people _want_ low density, but affordable! Both cannot be true. And thus, here there is conflict.

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

#636

Post by rcpt »

arcticbull wrote: post #617
rcpt wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily a San Franciscan figured it all out over one hundred years ago so we don't have to wonder about this: > THE GREAT PROBLEM IS SOLVED. We are able to explain social phenomena that have appalled philanthropists and perplexed statesmen all over the civilized world. We have found the reason why wages constantly tend to a minimum, giving but a bare living, despite increase in productive power: > As productive power…

Housing is literally exclusively a supply and demand problem. If you want rent to go down, allow more building. End of story. There's actually nothing else to it. Lower property values caused by an increase in supply will yield lower rents because rents are generally indexed to mortgage rates which are indexed to property values. The problem is twofold. 1. Americans view property as an investment while also wanting i…

Yes. Because of policies that favor landowners housing in California has become primarily an investment instead of a place to live.

However it's not simple supply and demand. We have a ton of "speculative demand" which increases when prices rise and we can't reasonably stop that by building more. Yes California needs to build but even if we started Shanghai levels of growth today it's unlikely we'd get affordable cities before climate change renders the state unlivable.

We need to kill land speculation and taxes are the right way to do that.

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

#637

Post by cheriot »

kmtrowbr wrote: post #466
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 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…

> 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.

100%. I think we agree on more that we disagree about, but we happen to be talking about Prop L.

The question on L is what's any of this have to do with the amount of money made by a CEO's employees? Should a CEO of a small number of highly paid employees be taxed less than the CEO of a large number of blue collar employees? That doesn't make any sense.

People talk about the ratio of employee to CEO pay because it's a quantifiable indicator of underlying causes. Trying to change the indicator directly misses the point. Why is the city so unaffordable to the working class? That's not being solved by this.

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

#638

Post by runarberg »

smsm42 wrote: post #604
runarberg wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I lived in a country where almost nobody was rich and it was fine. Then in the nineteens regonomics happened national resources were privatized and we had millionaires popping up until they almost literlly bankrupted the nation in the great recession of 2008.

Sorry but in my experience nothing ever good comes out of K shaped economy. I have a good reason to be salty towards the rich. I know that currently they are paying my salaries, but I am also aware that I am contributing more towards the wealth they are retrieving then I am. So strictly speaking I don’t need them. But even so, I would be fine if my entire industry would collapse and would leave me unemployed if it meant that the wealth the rich folks are accumulating at record pace would be distributed towards the working classes of every nation. I would rather make minimum wage in a world where that was the norm then to be taken advantage of by a wealthy class who consistently adds to their own wealth while the rest either stays the same or gets poorer.

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

#639

Post by chii »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #297
pydry wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you could open up a "food truck" on the weekends with a Walmart camp stove and a trip to Costco you'd eliminate the concentration fo market power and lack of risk capital as problems.

but then if you did so, and the food had issues, where do the customer complain and get compensation from?

How do you prevent over-crowding of a location, and flow-on effect of crowds from said truck?

How do you make sure the waste products are sanely disposed?

And a million other concerns from third parties unrelated to the business, but is affected by its existence?

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

#640

Post by mrits »

RhysU wrote: post #525
dfinninger wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

30 minutes won't take you from the river to North Loop. And even Redbud is slow in the opposite direction.

north-south commute? You must be new here.
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