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Comment by gaganpalrecha | Hacker News Reader

nice post, unfortunately SF payroll tax is 1.5% over $150,000 in payroll, not $250k in payroll as mentioned in your article :( It's a racket and is one of the reasons Twitter and Zynga are threatening to leave SF if the city doesn't give them a break on the tax. But it hurts the little guys more. If you have 4 employees making $40k each you have to pay 1.5% of 160k, which is $2400 (that amounts to almost 2 months of office rent or 75% of one employees monthly salary).

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Personally, I'd be willing to take a 1.5% paycut to work in SF instead of the Valley, because I can't stand suburban commutes. But that kind of reasoning is probably why I'm in NYC instead of out west to begin with.

EDIT: Also, I'd suspect that the "1.5% on payrolls over 150k" only applies to the amount in overage, because that's the way most graduated taxes work. So it'd be 150 bucks on the 10k of overage in your 160k example.

Well, in NYC you have a 1.5% income tax, rather than corporate tax, which is almost worse in a way.

Yeah, and that doesn't even bother me, because I love living here and wouldn't trade that 1.5% for a suburban commute. To start with, I don't have to own a car, so that alone probably puts me ahead on income (the cost of rent puts me right back behind again, though).

I am still upset as a Red Sox fan that a bunch of that money went to subsidizing the new Yankee Stadium, though.

but you could move to south san francisco, and have an easy bart commute and the company wouldn't have to pay any payroll tax.

no, it's not on the overage. It's on the total amount.

"It's a racket and is one of the reasons Twitter and Zynga are threatening to leave SF if the city doesn't give them a break on the tax."

Lots of cities have payroll taxes, and they're not a "racket" -- it's the cost of doing business in a city. What's unusual about SF is that it has a law that considers gains on employee stock options as taxable pay, not that it has a payroll tax.

well, if we were getting real services from it I wouldn't be as bothered by it.

Yeah. It's a shame we don't get anything like clean water, sewage treatment, police protection, 24/7 fire response, trash pickup, recycling, public transit, street repair or parks in exchange for our taxes.

What a scam.

The SF payroll tax limit is $250,000 now. It changed recently.

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