Salesforce CEO: tech billionaires 'hoard their money' and won't help homeless
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
300000000 / 8000 => $37,500 per individual per year.
How is the problem getting so much worse with almost $40k per year being spent on each individual homeless person? Where is that money going? How are these programs so inefficient that $40k spent on bulk relief is ineffective?
Why does anyone think that just increasing that number per person is going to solve anything, without a detailed plan about how to spend it?
Given the above, it's entirely rational to oppose Prop C, which doesn't provide details, transparency, or accountability about how the money will be spent.
It's not effective because it doesn't address any of the root problems. It just patches the person up and sends them out again, until they have another heart attack or psychotic break and end up running up another hospital bill.
http://www.counties.org/sites/main/files/file-attachments/pd...
Blatant plug: The folks at RideAlong are trying to solve these problems and they're hiring. I had a chance to work with them very briefly and they are really engaged and committed to solving these kinds of problems. YC alums too. https://getridealong.com/about-us/
511 people consumed $50 million (in 2014).
That number is absolutely jaw dropping to me. I expected it to be a skewed distribution, but that amount is just truly incredible.
It's a testament to how inefficient the current system is at helping those who need serious help, and should be a wake-up call to those who think throwing more money at the problem will actually fix anything.
That said, SF’s budget is one of the largest of any city in the US. I think i read that Pittsburgh (which is also a city + county) has a per capita budget less than half of SF’s.
Last I checked Pittsburgh wasn’t a wasteland, so where is all that extra money going?
Pittsburgh has a self-correcting mechanism around homelessness that San Francisco does not have.
It's called "winter".
A significant cold snap results in a lot of unfortunate deaths in the homeless.
Why does it cost SF twice as much per capita to run this city?
Roughly the same as it means for everyone else, because of the last clause of the 5th Amendment.
> who are the ones that have the most say in deciding where, when, and at what cost to build bulk low-income housing?
The question was about running he city, not building low income housing, but in either case the labor and real estate prices in the area party a significant role.
Not sure how applicable this is to SF, but the estimate there was that $30-50k/year was being spent on service usage for homeless people, which is the same ballpark as here (assuming the current budget actually includes e.g. medical costs).
I'd be willing to bet NIMBY antics are a large cause of this problem. SF metro area has the 4th highest rate of homeless people per capita, I have to imagine absurdly high rents is a part of it.
SF politicians don't want to admit this because of the donations/support they receive from NIMBY groups, but they are very clearly the cause of many problems in the bay area, whether its housing or slow transit expansion. It's especially ironic that such a "progressive" area would be so rife with elitism and gate keeping.
There's a robust correlation in US between homeless population and the stringency of zoning/land-use laws that restrict/delay/obstruct new housing: https://urbanpolicy.berkeley.edu/pdf/Raphael_homelessness_an...
Homeless problem is downstream of NIMBY problem -- it's not an issue with "mental health" or "drug use" (sure, the most flagrant instances of homelessness have those involved, but that's because of what makes things flagrant, not what makes people homeless), it's to do with pathological overpricing and undersupply of housing (especially and most crucially at the lower end of pricing) in US.
And no, "SF has earthquakes" isn't an excuse. So does Tokyo and they manage to build apartments and have rents far far lower than those in SF -- while having a /much/ higher population.
Even if they were keeping their gold in vaults, which would be harming them by denying themselves interest they are still not harming anyone. If you have an option to use a certain amount of resources and you don’t then those resources are still available to everyone else. If Bill Gates withdraws his net worth in cash and sets it on fire the productive capacity of the world is unchanged but he’s not going to use that money to buy anything. Everyone holding physical dollars is infinitesimally richer in terms of purchasing power.
If the company is publicly traded, executives' acquisition or disposal of stock is publicly disclosed through SEC Form 4:
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1512673/000120919118...
In October 2018 (so far), Jack Dorsey redeemed 103,035 shares @ a rough average of $80, bringing in $8,242,800 cash (pre-tax).
The homeless in San Francisco are mostly people who can’t afford to live anywhere because they are incapable of generating or maintaining anything of monetary value. Rents could fifty bucks a month and they’d still be on the streets. The problem, then, is how to take care of those people.
Hong Kong has really, really high rent but you don’t see people sleeping on the streets because shitty housing isn’t illegal. You can get a bed in a shared room. I wouldn’t want to live 18 to a room but it beats sleeping on the streets.
This is all about property owners zoning everywhere so cheap housing is illegal. Just making flophouses/single room occupancy legal again would make large improvements in the homeless situation.
Make building housing legal again.
And you cannot get a decent job without a place to live, which also puts pressure on bankruptcies. You cannot share an apartment when you have a family or when you cannot afford even that.
I've met lots of engineers that fall into that category.
Not to mention whole divisions and companies.
Besides exiling people from the community they were born into is genocide.
I may be thinking about this wrong, but it seems like doubling our spend might be a bad idea when we're doing so badly with what we're spending already. (Interested in input from folks that actually know how these numbers compare to other cities' spending).
However if we're actually doing well with the money we're spending (e.g. comparison to other cities is favourable) then absolutely let's increase the spend. I'm a little suspicious about the "let's tax the tech companies" mentality though; why not just a progressive individual income tax? (Or a moratorium on tax breaks for companies?) If we treat the tech companies like a piggy bank, then we'll eventually drive them away, and the whole region will be much less well off.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Franci... [2]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million-incre...
As a company with deep connections to HN, I for one hope that the Stripe staff active here are doing everything they can to challenge this embarrassing activity by their company. A good start would be to publicly express your opinion about this sort of lobbying here on HN.
These companies benefit hugely from government subsidies in various forms, and really the least they could do is abstain from using their tremendous power and resources to manipulate the government into making decisions that favor their bottom lines.
The Stripe founders are entitled to whatever backwards, selfish position they want to take, but they shouldn't be spending $400,000 on behalf of the company (a community of people) to try to buy a given policy outcome.
More broadly, it's sad that even the progressive mayor feels the need to make policy decisions based on fear that massively wealthy tech firms will punish the city if they ask them to pay a slightly fairer share of shared expenses. What we need is a cultural change, away from "anything that drives profit is justifiable" to "successful companies that side with their own profits against the public interest should be ashamed."
The reality is that San Fransisco can't house all is residents because it refuses to build more housing. And building more housing is something to which the city is highly adverse.
You can simultaneously be for fixing homelessness and be against destructive taxation of an industry.
>they ask them to pay a slightly fairer share
Let me stop you there. Your notion of calling this a "fairer share" is completely subjective and political. Why isn't a 99% tax of all profits fair, why not 0%? The phrase "paying their fair share" is nothing more than a baseless appeal to emotion, unless you're literally suggesting everyone pay the same amount for services they use. However, given that you are advocating raising taxes on entities already paying vastly more than the bottom 1/3rd, I strongly doubt you actually want equal taxation.
The broader tax environment in the United States is leading to growing income inequality. There are other countries with successful economies who tax the highest earners much more than we do. In my subjective opinion, fairness requires those who have been lucky enough to become rich to pay more taxes than they do in the U.S. at the moment. If it were up to me, companies who resist paying more taxes while their founders become overnight billionaires should be made to feel ashamed of doing so, hopefully driving up the cost of acting contemptibly toward their surrounding community by making it harder for them to hire. My subjective belief is that the problem of homelessness is worth spending more money on, and that it's really the least these companies can do to sit out of taxation debates.
Having $400,000 to spend manipulating public opinion is having a thumb on the scale. The ideal of democracy is not that whoever has the most power should have the loudest voice.
So are you also saying Benioff should stop supporting Prop C with his loud voice and big wallet?
Right, and it's just an opinion you back with no reasoning using historical context, economic analyses, etc. That's why it's all baseless crap.
Convince us why this policy is a good idea. Don't just give a ra-ra to everyone who already thinks it is.
The ideal of democracy is that everyone has an equal vote, no matter how loud their voice. Anything else is basically reminiscent of Harrison Bergeron. [0]
(And, in this case, the entity with a voice here does not even have a vote! Though its individual workers and owners and stakeholders do.)
When in the history of post-WW2 America has there been a situation where politicians have both the votes and the leverage to impose these kinds of frivolous taxes on corporations with the resources to fight them?
The mere fact that "lobbying" in the US is not called bribery, like it is everywhere else, means that a local politician's spine is only as erect as the size of the cheque he gets for his/her 're-election efforts'.
A yes vote is a vote in favor of authorizing the city and county of San Francisco to fund housing and homelessness services by taxing certain businesses at the following rates: 0.175 percent to 0.69 percent on gross receipts for businesses with over $50 million in gross annual receipts, or 1.5 percent of payroll expense for certain businesses with over $1 billion in gross annual receipts and administrative offices in San Francisco
If your business is low margin, high gross collectibles, this will KILL your business.
Transaction and retail companies will get murdered.
Are they expected to take out a loan to pay the tax?
Say you hand out this $300 million to people. Without building any more housing, this would clearly just raise rental prices with almost no change in homelessness.
Say you try to build 1000 new units of housing and pay out $300 million to the jobs created in that process. The people with these new jobs being given this $300m would drive up rental prices and shift a different group of people onto the street who can't afford the higher costs anymore.
Suppose you have rent control to try to avoid that shift. Then where will the people doing these newly created jobs live? There's a housing shortage throughout the entire bay area. They will probably have to commute huge distances.
You can't just build housing for homeless. You need to build more housing for everything else in the chain too.
Prop C is bad public policy because it does nothing to prevent homelessness, which is what San Franciscans should care most about. The homeless problem has been caused by the government distorting the housing marketplace. Allow people to build housing and get rid of rent control and the problem will solve itself.
I think Benioff should be open to listening to other people instead of being so adversarial.
https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2018/november-elections-gui...
It's so easy to sit on your butts and complain that Dorsey and the Collisons aren't doing more to help the homeless, but then to not call out SF's shitty non-profit grant system that makes the current funds hard to trace. Trust me, every single person in this city would be all over a concrete plan to fix the problem. I just don't think taxing the biggest businesses is going to do anything except make it more expensive to run your business in SF.
Benioff’s opinions are no more important than your next door neighbor’s.
Even though Benioff May be worth billions, he still only has one vote.
Also slightly amusing: Jack doesn't think that this is the "best" way to solve homelessness. Whats the best way, since clearly he knows about it, and why isn't he doing it?
I mean, it's pretty obvious that the best way to address homelessness involves having homes so that the most vulnerable of our friends and neighbors can stop being homeless by being in homes. This idea has given rise to an approach called Housing First. Which, by an odd twist of fate, has actually been shown to work!
This being San Francisco, this is utterly impossible. Nothing makes San Francisco politics break out in furious community meetings and protests and CEQA complaints like the prospect of building things. There's nothing Jack can do about that, even with all his money.
As near as I can tell, San Francisco doesn't actually want to solve this problem. Instead, it wants to feel good about how kind and compassionate its policies are without actually accepting change into the city's fabric.
This is by far the most irritating thing about reading CEO's "success story" profiles. It's always about going to market with the MVP, because if you wait long enough to make it perfect, the opportunity is lost to a competitor.
But when it comes to tax policy, the plan has to be perfect and not annoy anyone and anything less should be rejected outright.
It's possible that local tax policies, particularly as mandated by and only changeable by plebiscite, might be slightly more difficult to adjust (win an election, get one chance every two years) to changing requirements or to handle undesirable effects.
I'm not talking about candidates. We're literally talking about tax policy set and enacted via plebiscite. Elected officials don't get to tinker with it. As slow and complex as it is to change policies via representative democracy, it's far worse when you have to hold another plebiscite to fix glaring issues. Which has happened more than once in California political history.
That's what's at hand here. Tax policy enacted via a means that elected politicians don't actually get to work with. The issue you so correctly and wisely point to is messy enough - just imagine how much worse this particular Californian mess is.
For all that you're completely right about the apparently insane way tax policy is treated in American discourse, I think it might be worth considering that it could be encoded wisdom. Political attention spans tends to be short, inertia is real, and any policy creates winners who want to preserve it. Never mind questions of actually being reasonably sure about effects.
With all that in mind, treating tax policy as something you might not get to reform in a reasonable timeframe might not be the silliest of ideas. There's a good chance that it might be closer to the truth than expecting a calm, collected, non-partisan, informed debate aimed at making the policy work as intended once it's been shown to be in need of improvement.
1. Outsource their labor and production, that could be done stateside 2. They're refusing to use local materials (A business has to spend money to make money.. the money isn't following back in the local economy)
They're doing to leverage poorer economies to get goods and services cheaper. (That should at least account for the portio of the homeless that want to work but can't find it)
That's not to say rich people shouldn't use their money to affect positive change but if they did that it's really just a bonus positive force. If they weren't rich where would the money to improve the community come from? Also if rich person gives every homeless person $2M to buy a house what do you think would happen to house prices? (not that homelessness is just about money, it's more complicated than that)
How is the tech boom different from any previous period of explosive growth, in that regard?
Examine similar periods in the past, and you will find far more harmful consequences, that were given far less attention or caring by their progenitors.
Major developments in the past had far more disruptive and harmful consequences to affected communities, that were basically ignored and treated as "price of progress" by the people of the time.
How much negative impact does the current boom even have on local communities? It's very misleading to blame it for homelessness in San Francisco. The homeless of SF by and large aren't people who can't afford rent anymore so now they live on the street.
(I'm asking as a proponent of progressive tax rate, just not for this reason. So I'd like to clarify)
A flat tax, then, is actually quite regressive, rather than neutral.
Speaking in terms of companies, though, there is also a question of proportion vis a vis size—bigger companies and their employees tend to cost taxpayers quite a bit more than small businesses. There are no giant Twitter-like subsidies for five-man firms, for example. Larger firms are much more likely to make use of legal infrastructure, to need regulation, and to have the power to seek accommodation by the government for infrastructure needed for their given business.
I mean, it's not like infrastructure isn't decaying or anything...
The notion that rich people simply have to pay more for roads because they are rich is senseless.
Do you still agree with your statement if Amazon had to pay a toll for every shipment?
Are you saying that’s “not appropriate”?