Comment by dotBen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dotBen | Hacker News Reader

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Keep in mind SF.citi is a policy advocate/lobbying group for San Francisco legislation rather than the Bay Area more generally.

But they blend in wider Bay Area population stats because this is really about jobs that generate SF payroll tax which gives these employers a tacit say and leverage. Remember if you live in Oakland or Redwood City but are employed in San Francisco city/county, some of your payroll tax is being generated to benefit the city of San Francisco even if you are not a resident there.

That's why SF City is worried about SF based businesses and SF Bay Area workers.

(BTW this is also why cities such as Mountain View and Cupertino want to attract large business campuses like Google and Apple but don't want to build homes - they get more income from growing payroll tax but don't then have to spend more on schools, services etc for a growing population - they shift the burden onto other cities and counties that house those workers as they then have to generate tax revenue from other means)

> But they blend in wider Bay Area population stats because this is really about jobs that generate SF payroll tax which gives these employers a tacit say and leverage.

SF doesn’t have local payroll tax, it has a local income tax that applies both to residents and to nonresidents on income earned in SF.

EDIT: Actually, this is wrong, too; despite a lot of sources indicating it. Sab Francisco had a 1.5% payroll expense tax, but voted to phase it out in 2012, and then (while it had declined to a much lower but nonzero number), voted to eliminated it last year, both times in favor of a gross receipts tax on business

> SF doesn’t have local payroll tax, it has a local income tax that applies both to residents and to nonresidents on income earned in SF.

This is false. There are some low-quality websites that have incorrect information about a nonexistent 1.50% SF income tax, if that's where you're getting your information.

San Francisco used to have a payroll tax up until last year, when Prop F replaced it with a gross receipts tax. [1]

[1] https://sftreasurer.org/prop-f-overhaul

Do you happen to know the reason for favoring a gross receipts tax over the previous payroll tax? Just curious as someone who previously lived in an area with a Griggs receipt tax, it seems it was universally despised.

Hilariously, it was done because the tech companies, particularly Twitter, which had small gross receipts and high payroll, pushed for it.[0]

Later, Square, founded by the same person as Twitter got pretty badly screwed by this very same tax [1], and it got worse when Prop C passed.

[0]: https://www.spur.org/news/2012-09-28/time-now-business-tax-r...

[1]: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Square-is-suing...

“pretty badly screwed” = growing to a $90B company.

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