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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

#561

Post by austincheney »

dminvs wrote: post #551
austincheney wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fort Worth is in the same state, almost the same population, growing just as fast, and has similar taxes. Yet Fort Worth doesn’t have the visible homeless problem that Austin and San Francisco do.

This is partly because the private security force employed by the wealthy Bass brothers forcefully (and sometimes violently) discourage the homeless from existing in downtown Fort Worth, especially the Sundance Square area. I used to work downtown (Oil & Gas Commerce building) and became friends with the night-shift security guard, who told some really shocking stories about how the Bass goons would drag the homeless…

That might be 0.1% of the city’s land area. Not really a significant cause. If you applied that exact same factor to Austin there would still be a ton of homeless people everywhere.

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

#562

Post by digitaltrees »

mrits wrote: post #463
norswap wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#563

Post by noobermin »

spinningslate wrote: post #57
rdiddly wrote: post #29

"Critics call the surcharge a blatant attempt at redistribution of wealth..." Um, yes? "Critics call John Travolta 'blatantly an actor, playing parts in movies.'"

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?…

The people posting here are the ones who are going to be taxed, that's why they are complaining.

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

#564

Post by rmk »

mdorazio wrote: post #554
rmk wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#565

Post by 0goel0 »

kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #188

It 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.

So you're saying entrepreneurs wouldn't start companies in SF because some day their companies will pay 0.1% tax if they make 100x the average employee?

That's all it takes for founders to get discouraged? Well then maybe they should not start up in the first place.

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

#566

Post by _prototype_ »

cle wrote: post #545
_prototype_ wrote: post #538

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait are you seriously suggesting we adopt a taxation policy the CCP utilizes? Did I miss something?

A policy being associated with the CCP doesn't automatically mean it's wrong or that we can't learn something from it.

This one is

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

#567

Post by digitaltrees »

hiphipjorge wrote: post #488
s3r3nity wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China taxes land appreciation between 30-60%. If you want support for your causes in the US, you probably don’t want to compare it to a communist regime that scares the crap out of people. Unless this was sarcastic...?

China does absolutely scare the crap out of both it’s own people and people abroad, but economically it’s clear they’ve done a lot of things right over the last 40 years. The US could learn a thing or two from the communists when it comes to Capitalism.

I don’t think they’ve done things right; they were granted access to the global trade network and had wages at pennies on the dollar from other countries. It would be almost impossible not to grow under those circumstances. Let’s see if their decisions are as effective when wages are more on parity and they are competing as peer economic levels.

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

#568

Post by digitaltrees »

bhupy wrote: post #455
s3r3nity wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> China taxes land appreciation between 30-60%. If you want support for your causes in the US, you probably don’t want to compare it to a communist regime that scares the crap out of people. Unless this was sarcastic...?

I think it's fair that comparing something to China doesn't win adherents, but just because China does it, doesn't mean that it's "communist". China has shopping malls — does that make shopping malls communist? Also, a Land Appreciation Tax isn't really radically different from the status quo in the US today. Land appreciation is already taxed as capital gains, it's just that the capital gains tax is intentionally se…

Depends who owns the shopping mall

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

#569

Post by digitaltrees »

primitivesuave wrote: post #369
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 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.

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

#570

Post by digitaltrees »

ransom1538 wrote: post #422
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…

"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 population can't figure out how to keep the tenderloin from being full of tents and open drug use? Or get some form of functioning public transit? Pretty pathetic." SF resident for 15 years until I left. I walked around and talked to homeless. From th…

Maybe it’s good to see these issues rather than pretend they don’t exist.
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