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Comment by riazrizvi | Hacker News Reader

These federal policies that don’t account for regional differences in income are a problem. The salary level where this kicks in is $130k. On the peninsula in the Bay Area where many people will be effected, the average price of a home is about 7X the national average. $130k might be a lot where home prices are $300k, but around here it’s barely a living wage. If your taxed an additional 40% on a possible $100k that you may never see, then it becomes poverty level in this area.

Maybe this guy does not know what he is doing?

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If, on the other hand, you got a tax break for living in the high-cost Bay Area, then you could buy a house to build a lot of wealth and sell it later to retire someplace cheaper. Not exactly fair to people who live where salaries are lower.

The proper way to make things fair is to tax landlords on the land value [1] of their properties. They are the ones pulling in all the unearned income in high cost areas.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

Yes please. Federal property tax.

> The proper way to make things fair is to tax landlords on the land value of their properties. They are the ones pulling in all the unearned income in high cost areas.

Bernie owns 3 houses, he will never support land value tax. Almost all progressive Berniecrats in Bay Area are NIMBYs [1].

Bernie is right about healthcare, but he is wrong about virtually everything else, in my opinion.

[1] https://sf.curbed.com/2020/2/20/21122662/san-francisco-bay-a...

$100k in stock at vest time valuation is an huge amount.

If your are an employee with a quite large 0.05% equity grant per year, that's a $2Billion unicorn already that is ready to IPO or buy back shares from employees.

> around here it’s barely a living wage

I dare you to say that to your janitor or receptionist.

Working in a startup that turns into a pre-ipo $2bn unicorn is like winning the startup lottery. The majority of years spent in early stage startups is spent accumulating worthless stock, where paper valuations will never materialize outside a funding negotiation room.

> I dare you to say that to your janitor or receptionist.

Yes I understand unskilled workers are worse off, but I’m not sure what your argument is there.

> I dare you to say that to your janitor or receptionist.

Whataboutism. Just because other problems exist does not make this problem not exist.

Janitors in SF doing pretty well: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/04/how-one-bay-area-janitor-mad...

That guy has some level of seniority so he can work an average of 11 hours a day, 365 days a year. If you lower that to averaging not working 5 days every 2 months (so still working 56 of 61 days every 2 months), he’d be averaging 12 hours a day.

This possibly makes the case even worse for janitors than help showing how they fare.

Roughly estimating. If a person has 2 days off per week (weekends) and either 12 or 24 total days off a year from federal holidays, sick days, vacation days, that is an average of 20 or 21 working days a month.

There's a lot of knee-jerk reaction going on in this thread, and yet I don't think this bill would actually apply to anyone complaining.

The chance of getting in early enough to a $2B company that exits comfortably has to be under 1%. Maybe under 0.5%. CB Insights has an article from a few years ago saying 1.28%.

Taking out companies below $2B, companies that didnt pan out so well (Magic Leap, Zenefits, WeWork), and you doing the right things to take advantage of your equity, I’m guessing that number drops to 0.35% or 0.25% or 1 in 300-400 startups.

Might as well not consider such an unlikely scenario. Plus if things don’t pan out at a startup and you’re just looking for money. You quite possibly made less during those years.

$125k is considered the baseline to get by in SF. Meaning you can live comfortably with rent and food. Anything below that is considered poverty.

Maybe this is true if you have a family, but it’s completely untrue for a single individual

I don't think implicit federal subsidies for Bay Area housing are a good idea either, though.

That would just create a federal policy to strengthen the status quo.

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