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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

#731

Post by loco5niner »

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…

I don't fear for my families safety just walking outside our front door because of rich people, I fear a homeless, drugged up person assaulting them.

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

#732

Post by smsm42 »

runarberg wrote: post #638
smsm42 wrote: post #604

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pa…

> up until they almost literlly bankrupted the nation in the great recession of 2008

Iceland I guess? If you like what you've got, don't try real actual socialism. Believe me, it sucks. You'd regret it.

> I have a good reason to be salty towards the rich

If my guess is correct, you experience is an unique result of a very bad situation which was manufactured by some dirty politicians, some PhD'ed idiots and some greedy bastards (see my comment about the assholes above). That doesn't mean everybody who is rich is a bastard. Having money is a wrong marker, and your saltiness is way off target.

> it meant that the wealth the rich folks are accumulating at record pace would be distributed

That never ever happens. I mean, even if it happened it would amount to tiny crumbs for you ("you livelihood and all you've done for living are gone and you have no means to support you family or procure food, but here's your check for $275, enjoy it!") - you can't both whine about "tiny number of people owning stuff" and expect taking their stuff would make you rich - "tiny number" means you only get a tiny part of it. Arithmetics is a cruel science.

But in fact there's no "distribution" ever possible. Never happened, never will. There's only destruction and desolation. It is possible to target Bill Gates's wealth and destroy it. Shut down Microsoft, make all its workers unemployed, blow up the campuses and wipe out the backups. Can be done. You won't be even $275 richer from that though. Nothing will be "distributed", just destroyed. This is the only way it has ever worked or can work. Revolutions do not make anyone richer, but they do make a lot of people starve and die.

> I would rather make minimum wage in a world where that was the norm

No you wouldn't. I lived in that world, and I haven't seen any single person who after experiencing both wanted to remain in the minimum wage world. Millions wanted to move out and took extraordinary efforts - often risking their lives - to do it. Remember the Berlin wall? Why do you think they needed the wall - is it to hold out the West Germans itching to experience the blessings of the East German minimal wage? How many South Koreans you think want to move to North Korea to enjoy the guaranteed rice rations?

> 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.

But that's not true. The rest doesn't get poorer - in fact, the number of people living in poverty is declining steadily. Yes, I know you had a bad experience in 2008, but if you're willing to have a broader look you can easily see it: https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty

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

#733

Post by mrits »

mbesto wrote: post #470
norswap wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Odd thing to argue about that is easily provable with a Zillow search. Plenty of half acre lots that sold int he last year for ~$5K east of downtown but certainly before farm country. And capital metro goes past it all the way to the toll road.

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

#734

Post by smsm42 »

runarberg wrote: post #725
newfriend wrote: post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The rich have polluted the planet Rich people aren't tipping over trashcans or shitting on my sidewalk. > raised the global temperature up a whole degree This doesn't actually affect you, you've just been brainwashed into thinking it's the most important thing ever. Emissions are going down in all of the most highly developed countries. As technology improves, this will improve as well. You're complaining about pro…

> Rich people aren't tipping over trashcans or shitting on my sidewalk. Are you seriously equating globally warming the planet with littering? Yes the latter is annoying but the former is literally killing a significant number of people around the world every day. You can’t blame the fires solely on bad forest management. Yes forests in California could (and should) be managed better, but with the climate disaster fu…

> if this were an actual option more people would do it.

How much more? US has over 31M small businesses. How many do you need to conclude it's an option? 99.9% of businesses in the US are small businesses (obviously, since you only need one person to make a small business and 100K persons to make a Walmart). If normal folks can't afford it, who are all those? I know several people having businesses, in what way they are not "normal"? Not all of them are rich (in fact, most of them aren't, most are making a good living, some better than others, but none I know are billionaires so far) but how this is not normal? I think your picture here is very skewed.

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

#735

Post by primitivesuave »

runarberg wrote: post #623
primitivesuave wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I met a guy walking home in the TL, he had hitchhiked from a trailer park in North Carolina to SF. His neighbor in the trailer park made amateur porn websites, so he pretty much learned web development purely in the context of pornography. He was addicted to meth and came to SF looking for a job and the free methodone treatment. His laptop got stolen so I gave him an old Macbook I had lying around and told him to che…

I am currently a web developer earning 6 figures in the Seattle area. I learned the skill in the Front End development course in Noisebridge—a hacker space in the Mission. They provided a free course, every Tuesday (or was it Monday) evening. I was living in a van at the time (what many people consider homeless). I know I might have learned the craft without this resource but I feel like this course made things signi…

This is such a wonderful story, thank you for sharing it! I have plenty of stories of how Noisebridge has affected many people, it’s a truly wonderful place.

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

#736

Post by rmk »

scottlocklin wrote: post #700
rmk wrote: post #668

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree with everything you said. But how does woke and liberal politics square with almost complete apathy to the the plight of the homeless (or of those verging on homelessness)? Almost nothing has been done to make housing affordable (even very modest, incremental bills in this regard have been shot down). If you consider the plight of agricultural workers and housing for them, you would be even more befu…

What you're missing is the "left" has long since transferred its affections away from poor people who are not wards of the state. "Woke" politics magically appeared in 2008 when leftists were manning occupy wall street, which pretty much immediately degenerated into escalating virtue signalling instead of, you know, making some reforms to wall street. I'm sure that was a total coincidence.

Well, it did appear to result in the CFPB (the thing that Elizabeth Warren was heading?) and Dodd-Frank, perhaps (one can never attribute these things to some particular movement or event, I feel). I don't know if they have been defanged already.

Anyhoo, so what is the pet constituency of the left? They do appear to be falling over themselves to regularise illegal immigrants (perhaps the Latinos in Texas handing Trump a win will give them pause?), while doing nothing for legal immigrants (who power the only growth sector America has going for it, technology.) They certainly don't care much for the working poor, as you have rightly pointed out.

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

#737

Post by zamfi »

arcticbull wrote: post #694
zamfi wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Americans view property as an investment while also wanting it to be affordable. These are mutually exclusive. If you want something to be a good investment you want it to become less affordable over time. This comes up a lot, but is false. It's easy to have every single home become more expensive over time while the average unit remains affordable. Let me paint a picture of how it would work in a city where you…

I see what you're saying, that densification and building up vertically means each unit represents a smaller proportion of the footprint of the building. This in turn means that the ground under the building becomes progressively more valuable as the average density of construction increases. This can happen either by permitting smaller units or by building taller, or both. This feels transient to an extent no? At so…

> This feels transient to an extent no? At some point your building is tall enough and your unit as small as people are willing to accept.

Yes, there is an endgame here -- and also, truth be told, construction costs per unit start to go up once you pass 4 or 5 stories, so there's other economics at play.

But that endgame is Tokyo or midtown Manhattan, and we're not close to those levels of density basically anywhere on Earth -- and certainly not in the USA, where you can count with one finger the number of cities that might not be able to increase density because the buildings are so tall it's hard to imagine building more-attractive taller ones.

> But does this not apply primarily to the land underneath the building? Once you reach a certain plateau a 700sqft apartment on the 10th floor of a 50 story building isn't worth any more than an apartment on the 10th floor of a 70 story building is it?

This is an interesting question -- in my example, you might think it's pretty clear that a single condo in a 4-plex would be less valuable than the same land area with a single family home (even if all 4 units together are worth more). But it's not clear why a single condo in a 25-story doorman building is inherently more valuable than a similar condo in a 50-story doorman building, which is basically the only density increase that's realistic -- and in fact, maybe the larger building supports more amenities, making the individual units more expensive as density increases? Also, this level of density supports rapid transit that allows for more effective geographical distribution than the "freeways choked with traffic" sprawl we're seeing today.

That said, this is not the situation that SF (or really, any market in the USA outside of Manhattan) finds itself in. In all these cities, developers could build a larger number of less-expensive units to replace more-expensive lower-density units on a given land area (and still profit! And increase housing supply!), if they were allowed to by zoning and other (typically local) policy.

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

#738

Post by cheriot »

burkaman wrote: post #720
cheriot wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're focusing on where the money goes. That doesn't change the fact that this is a uniquely bad way to raise it. Transfer taxes are not like capital gains or income taxes. There is no value being created when something is transferred. > people who "barely pay any tax at all" are worth helping Millionaire property owners are barely paying any taxes. Disneyland and every other large commercial building is bar…

Is there an economic term for the different types of taxes you're referring to? It's not obvious to me why income taxes create value but this tax doesn't, but I don't really know anything about economics. Similarly, while I do think everyone is worth helping, I'm not yet seeing how this helps millionaires and large landlords.

I wish I remembered. What I'm referring to, though, is that income and cap gains tax things based on the amount of money being made.

A transfer tax says, "oh, the owner change - here's the same tax for a money losing project as an extremely profitable one". It's just disincentivizing change.

This tax is even being talked about because things like CA Prop 15 being voted down leave schools/cities underfunded by giving long time land owners a massive tax break.

We need to make the system more fair not just tax everything that moves.

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

#739

Post by cheriot »

adjkant wrote: post #388
cheriot wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen people take that position and I see a fundamental mistake. Look at rust belt cities. Look at NYC in the 70s. When employers leave the people left behind are not better off. This doesn't mean we need to kiss big tech ass, but we have a city where getting a job is a solved problem. Very few places on earth have that. Rent prices are the underlying problem pushing people out. Underlying _that_ problem is a lac…

> we have a city where getting a job is a solved problem. This is the case for the tech industry, not categorically. Important distinction there.

I'm not saying it's _easy_ to find a job, but the city's unemployment rate was 2%. That's unheard of.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CASANF0URN

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

#740

Post by smilekzs »

mola wrote: post #678
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…

Why is homeless people in the tenderloin so bad? Is there a safety issue? Do they Rob or murder? (Genuinely asking) If not, than why is it so bad? Because you don't like seeing the poor? I mean sure people forced to homelessness is a problem from their view point. This is usually related to their upbringing and could be avoided if you have a strong welfare state that don't let children grow in crappy situations with…

> Do they Rob or murder?

Yes they do. Have you ever parked on the streets of SF?

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