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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

#651

Post by rorykoehler »

digitaltrees wrote: post #562
mrits wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

It's more important and more achievable to become financially independent rather than to become outrageously wealthy. Someone with a tech job and 3 rental properties has a lot more flexibility in life than someone with a tech job and some stock/options in the same tech company they work for.

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

#652

Post by joemazerino »

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 pay more in taxes than most of my friends and SF has little to show for it. How many times does one have to call 311 to have garbage cleaned up or a disturbance investigated?

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

#653

Post by drak0n1c »

LVTfan wrote: post #598
drak0n1c wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taxes tend to increase price levels, not reduce them. Costs are passed through to every level.

Likely true of most taxes, but not true of a tax on land value. Taxing land value heavily causes underused land to either be put to good use or sold, at a reasonable price, to someone who will build on it. Taxing land value -- that is, collecting the lion's share of the annual rental value of the land for public purposes -- removes the speculative element, and makes it worth only what it is worth FOR USE. That almost…

I agree land value tax is a far more efficient tax than property or revenue taxes. The goal should be to raise revenue with minimal impact on commercial decisions. Punitive revenue/wealth taxes are essentially a form of sin taxes and distort the marketplace.

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

#654

Post by haxney »

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…

> If you want rent to go down, allow more building. End of story. There's actually nothing else to it.

There's actually another solution, but people don't talk about it: reduce demand. Break some windows. Have a few organized robbery parties. Hold monthly "Stabby Sundays" where you just stab people randomly. That'll drive down demand, and prices will drop like a rock.

Obviously, I'm joking. Building more houses is the only solution to the problem of "a lot of people want to live here" and "it's almost impossible to build new houses."

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

#655

Post by freeone3000 »

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).

If you depend on public transit in Austin, you're not going to be able to commute reliably no matter where you live.

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

#656

Post by opportune »

ummonk wrote: post #647
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-…

To be honest I think there is a bit of semantic trickery here by homeless advocates. In colloquial parlance, “homeless” means “unsheltered” rather than “lacking a long term living arrangement”.

If you look at the link I posted below, people living in shelters and transitional housing and cars (not couch surfers which I think were not counted) still outnumber those sleeping outside.

Again, the people sleeping in homeless shelters are still homeless, you probably just don’t notice them because they aren’t causing trouble

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

#657

Post by rmk »

mypalmike wrote: post #649
rmk wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

40% of SF residents are married. That is just slightly lower than nearby mostly suburban Sonoma County at 47%. And the median age of an SF resident is actually higher than the state median.

How many with young (K-12) children?

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

#658

Post by asdff »

rmk wrote: post #535
sroussey wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was upped to about $600m. Good luck getting an audit.

Okay, that is something on the order of $10,000 per person if there's a homeless population of 60,000 people. I doubt if SF has such a large homeless population. Does this $600 million cover things like Churches sheltering the homeless, pantries, and such? Or is it in addition to the the $600 million? Something is very rotten here.

SF has 10k homeless people. You can give everyone $60k a year outright right now and they would live a very comfortable life on that in the midwest.

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

#659

Post by asdff »

rmk wrote: post #564
mdorazio wrote: post #554

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're off by almost an order of magnitude [1]. Even if we say the official estimates are off by a huge margin and there are actually 20,000 homeless in SF, that's $30K per person, on top of however many millions are given out via begging and other programs. It's insanity. [1] https://sfgov.org/scorecards/safety-net/homeless-population

Oh my. I feel like I will never understand California politics. Such blatant corruption and such a large vulnerable population, but also such a huge 'woke' electorate. It would take some crazy mental gymnastics to reconcile these things.

It's because CA voters are bombarded with propositions every election. At least a half dozen. People barely have time to study the issues, so they go off what makes sense from the headline or the title of the measure on the ballot. Hence being fleeced by Prop 22 and the new privacy laws, which sure looked pretty when they were sitting there in the ballot.

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

#660

Post by dllthomas »

rmk wrote: post #535
sroussey wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was upped to about $600m. Good luck getting an audit.

Okay, that is something on the order of $10,000 per person if there's a homeless population of 60,000 people. I doubt if SF has such a large homeless population. Does this $600 million cover things like Churches sheltering the homeless, pantries, and such? Or is it in addition to the the $600 million? Something is very rotten here.

I don't have the bandwidth right now to consider the actual numbers, but one thing worth noting - as it's often overlooked in these discussions - is that much of the money spent on homelessness is spent keeping people in housing such that they're not homeless. Dividing by the number that still remain homeless isn't the right choice of denominator for anything meaningful.
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