While President Obama gives the nation a healthy dose of San Francisco’s stylistic “progressive” politics, this city is pushing the limits--- proposing higher taxes on the city’s businesses.
New burdens on the city’s job creators, when the city is losing jobs: Classic progressive logic.
It’s only appropriate that several members of the city’s governing council, the Board of Supervisors and its “progressive” members, with little or no business background, born and bred within the bureaucracy, show the dangers of idealized, uninformed governance.
Without care for consequences, and as the nation will learn through Obama progressivism, carrying out questionable social justice programs is very expensive, economically depressing, and ineffective.
Faced with a fiscal catastrophe – a current budget deficit in San Francisco of over $576 million --- the Board voted to ask voters for new or increased taxes on business to finance bureaucracy-heavy social programs.
Here’s the lineup: Increase in payroll tax from 1.5% to 1.7%, a .5% increase in the sales tax, a gross receipts tax of .1% on businesses with $2 million or more of gross receipts, a tax of about 1.4% on rents paid to commercial property owners, and finally, a carbon tax!
Add to these proposed taxes previously mandated sick leave, mandated health care, and the highest minimum wage in the country.
San Francisco’s office buildings are emptying. Condo developers are slashing prices monthly, since like the city's office space, hundreds of high rise condos are dark and vacant.
Wealth redistribution is nothing new to San Francisco. Now the nation will learn how feel good programs soak the life out of small business, entrepreneurs, and growing firms, through taxes. The ‘moral imperative’ failed during the Great Society era, and is failing again here.
Ask any tourist about the city’s condition, about the rampant violent crime, homelessness, and open drug use on San Francisco streets, demoralized law enforcement, and limp criminal justice system.
San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors proves, that as the city’s fiscal ship sinks and lists to its side, progressives will be so ignorant as to tax their businesses, who hire the workers, who need the salaries to pay their bills, and face layoffs as taxes and mandates increase.
Then again, what do expect from lifetime bureaucrats-turned-leaders, or community organizers, who’ve never met a payroll, or paid payroll taxes.
Comments
It's amazing that anyone without business operations experience for more than five years, that anyone without an MBA or similar degree with classes in Economics (passed with an A), and anyone without
You can't give what you don't have.
And to have, you have to work hard to produce, to compete well on the world stage, and not steal through usury and printing money.....
Has one of the Supervisors ever worked that hard? 120 hour weeks for years, and for what? Administrative Assistants who are angry that an architect trained at one of the hardest schools in the world, with fiduciary duties to clients, and with an MBA in Real Estate (something not offered in any school past Texas that I know of), should dare have earned the right to earn more than them?
THAT'S what I have faced here...even from immigrants...who don't have to work as hard and who have health care given to them while I can't get it....due to low wages....and due to immigrants and children of immigrants who get their licenses here and are allowed to "sell" their architect's stamp for $400 - for those yanking money out the gazoo for no good reason in construction and "expediting" fees - practicing architecture and engineering without a license....
And people here wonder why real professionals from other parts of the US wipe the dust off their feet as they leave, as they have been doing for the past four years, in droves, out of California.
Don't wonder. Just keep watching.
First sentence of post did not come through, was as follows:
It's amazing that anyone without business operations experience for more than five years, that anyone without an MBA or similar degree with classes in Economics (passed with an A), and anyone without very good (top school) technical training in problem-solving/research skills, coupled with P&ID training - Process and Instrumentation Diagram - or efficiency training, all specific to top-drawer architecture and engineering training programs at just a few schools across the US - be allowed to make policy decisions in government.
We have a complex society, and it requires those kinds of persons to run it well....does the Board of Supervisors reflect that kind of training? I think not....
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