IMO, if the California Republican party was smart they would make this a wedge issue in the next election. "Elect us, and we'll make it possible to use Uber again."
https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/uber-is-officially-allowed-in-qu...
I wouldn't describe what happened in Quebec as a loss for Uber.
You mean, overcrowding a market with underpaid positions, sold with lies and marketing to make them sound better than they are, to force people with full time jobs out of work so that people could get a ride in a vehicle with no safety, security, (or originally) background verification while doing all they could to cheat regulations, driver and user privacy, tax laws, climate change, and eventually, now, rent-seek, to boost stock prices to pad Vegas parties and investor portfolios.
Modern ride sharing is not sustainable, environmentally friendly, or a 'job' and this doesn't exempt the bad behaviors by taxi companies, but understand this is the end destination of capitalism invading a regulated economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregory_v._Helvering
Government doesn't exist to collect taxes. They are there to provide governance. Taxes are a necessary evil that should be kept to a minimum to provide the service of governance.
If someone can come up with a legal operational structure that gets around taxes then that the government didn't do its job.
It's only easy to get around taxes when the taxes aren't closely tied to the service the government is providing. i.e. when you taxing one individual or business for a service provided to other individuals or businesses.
Right, they passed a law, AB5, to better do that job.
"To dodge the shareholders' taxes is not one of the transactions contemplated as corporate "reorganizations."
And from the SC ruling:
"The whole undertaking, though conducted according to the terms of [the statute], was in fact an elaborate and devious form of conveyance masquerading as a corporate reorganization, and nothing else. ... [T]he transaction upon its face lies outside the plain intent of the statute. To hold otherwise would be to exalt artifice above reality and to deprive the statutory provision in question of all serious purpose."
If there's no business purpose beyond tax avoidance, the government can indeed hold you to the higher tax rate. I don't think that's what happened here, i think there are legitimate non-tax reasons for Uber/Lyft's structure, but it's not a completely unreasonable take to disagree with that.
And even if not, the government is free to change the law to fix things, which it did.
This is a transparent ploy by Lyft and Uber to try and extort the state into changing the law by holding their drivers' livelihoods ransom.
When did California eliminate private property? When did it hand over the means of production to the proletariat?
Last I checked, capitalism was alive and well in California, which is the dearly beloved home of the most successful capitalist entities and richest people on the planet.
If California's policies really were far left, all those companies would be owned and run by their workers, and no one would be richer than anyone else.
But that's not California, is it?
Seems to happen quite a bit in monoideological areas.
Have they tried it to confirm it 'doesn't work'? Maybe rideshare companies need to reduce their cut, and start putting more of that money into the driver's pocket. Doesn't mean it can't be a profitable business, though possibly low-margin. Have they tried paring back development costs, marketing costs, etc?
In the meantime, they'll operate at a loss. If they leave the California market, they'll simple lose money slower.
The former tends to adapt okay to predictable demand, the latter tends to not at all.
Before Lyft and Uber, my usual wait time for a Taxis in the Seattle area was on the order of 45 minutes to an hour. Since the rideshare companies became common, the wait time for taxis has gone down, but its still longer than the wait for Lyft.
If prices were to go up, sure, Lyft would have less business, but presumably there is some price point that pays drivers enough and also makes the economics work for Lyft.
Yes it does matter in the debate.
Because when we are passing laws, we should care about both the pros and the cons of a particular policy.
You can feel free to say that the pros outweight the cons for these laws, but you still need to recognize that shutting down ride sharing is a con of these laws.
Those are the drawbacks of these laws, and it is OK for people to care about these drawbacks, and bring them up into the debate.
There are peculiarities to Lyft and Uber’s business model, being on demand is not one.
Your definition of on-demand is more like a bus or train, not lyft or uber. i.e. you have to actually go to a bus stop or train stop, which could be out of the way, and you have to deal with their schedule. That's hardly on-demand.
Uber and lyft's business model is absolutely based on being on-demand. I would take a bus or train if it was even close to as convenient.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamex_Operations_West,_Inc._...
This is like saying that raising the minimum wage will drive McDonald's out of business. At the current prices, sure, but McDonald's will raise prices 10% to compensate (wages are not 100% of the cost of a burger) and keep on trucking.