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Comment by yonran | Hacker News Reader

See the earliest filing in CGC19579061 for Square’s complaint (https://webapps.sftc.org/ci/CaseInfo.dll?CaseNum=CGC19579061).

The headline is a bit misleading because I don’t think there are any banks in a similar situation to Square: a bank that receives most of their revenue from transaction processing fees and whose employees are almost all in San Francisco (San Francisco apparently apportions company revenue according to where the employees are).

Note: In California, local governments use relatively unfair gross receipts taxes instead of more efficient taxes because Proposition 13 (1978) forbids fair property taxes, and RTC 17041.5 (1963) forbids local income taxes (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...). So we tax gross receipts of large companies, with 7 different rate schedules based on different industries in order to sort of approximate income.

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The CEO and Founder of Square lobbied in favor of those gross receipt taxes when it benefited his previous company (Twitter) but has changed his tune since then.

Shocking how people go after their own self interests.

Surely: shocking how some people go after their own self interest, without giving a damn about anyone else.

Tech bro and his pockets smashing up his society while the world burns.

Much of the "disruption" that came over the past decade can be attributed to someone wanting to be [something] while being treated like [something else], trying to write their own rules, fill their pockets, with little regard to what anyone else thinks or does.

The blanket excuse is always "We are a tech company". No, you are a company who brought more tech to the field but still very much in the same field.

I for one am grateful for all that "disruption." The much needed improvement in the areas of transportation, accommodation, payment, etc. might never have happened if all these companies stuck by the old rules.

Almost no improvement in transportation.

You must not know what taxis used to be like.

> might never have happened if all these companies stuck by the old rules.

Then change the rules. Breaking them and pretending you are better is not the way. This is the most common excuse when people break the law.

There are hundreds of examples where you'd feel less than grateful if someone "disrupted" the sector by breaking the law and I'm sure you can think of a few. Off the top of my head, law enforcement agencies are "disrupting" the justice system by bypassing due process and warrants, just to optimize and make things better of course. Just because it suits you once in a while doesn't make it acceptable.

You could have used this line of reasoning on civil disobedience in the 60s. Sometimes it just has to be done that way. I don't particularly care that uber or airbnb broke some laws I didn't strongly agree with in the first place.

I didn’t even realize that the headline was incorrect for another reason: The tax rate for banks under the Gross Receipts Tax is actually 0%, not 0.4%+ as implied by the headline! (Business and Tax Code 954(f)(1) http://library.amlegal.com/nxt/gateway.dll/California/busine...) Instead of a local gross receipts tax, the state of California imposes a 2% bank tax on net income (RTC 23151 http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayText.xh...). The gross receipts tax on financial services is on businesses other than banks and insurance companies.

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