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Comment by blackflame | Hacker News Reader

When will the people of SF learn you cannot tax yourself to prosperity

The City & County of SF has the seventh highest median income of all U.S. counties [0]. The GDP of the Bay Area ranks ahead of all but 16 countries [1]. If taxes are correlated with prosperity it'd seem as though SF had found a way to tax itself to prosperity. (Of course in reality economics and tax policy are far more complicated than this).

0: https://bea.gov/newsreleases/regional/lapi/lapi_newsrelease.... 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20171208145551/https://www.bea.g...

Your argument assumes the correlation, but you're arguing that the causation exists without even establishing the correlation.

You can’t ride on the coattails of FANGO (Oracle) forever. For every person doing well you have just as many doing drugs in a tent on the streets below multimillion dollar 2 bedroom lofts

When they move to Texas.

Where they will learn that Texas government pays for itself with oil and gas extraction taxes, which don't exist in California.

The Bay Area pays for itself with the tech industry.

No, the Bay Area rides on the coattails of tech. Severs can be anywhere and the second they decide Nevada (Cough Oracle) is cheaper, good by to all the money financing the impractical public policy. Humans are naturally selfish and greedy. That is fundamentally incompatible with any socialization of sufficient size

Texas and the oil industry are one and the same, fully intertwined. God help the poor soul that owns land where a private oil company wants to build a pipeline or plant. Said land will be instantly seized by the company under eminent domain laws and the owner will get a pittance in return.

If you're cool with that, then Texas is a great place for you to live.

While this article is about Louisiana, the same laws (and practices) exist in Texas: https://www.nola.com/news/environment/article_75b4ff32-0d87-...

Yeah. Sadly you never really own your house. Even after you payoff the mortgage, which many won't because they always refinance and consolidate loans. But even if you do end up paying off the mortgage, then you have to pay rent to the government, which who knows when your neighborhood will be torn down to build a highway or high speed rail project.

Then if you own the land, you don't even own the water, oil or whatever else might be under it. Remember abou a decade ago seeing something where a guy was disputing the county in Oregon over water rights, and they even illegally entered his property with no warrants or anythings.

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