Payments companies have all left SF after Prop C | Hacker News Reader

Payments companies have all left SF after Prop C

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24 pointssicromoft15 comments

From what I gather prop C is a tax raise on businesses to help secure funding to combat homelessness in SF.

It is a very common trope that you hear when politicians are trying to raise taxes that "rich people will leave if you do that" and certainly some will do that. I think in the USA this is particularly problematic because there's a huge different between moving from a country to another and moving from one state to another.

But what should be done about it? It is very likely that simply the state getting more money is not really going to solve a crisis that is much more systemic. Not that I'm against taxes against businesses, specially these extremely high gross businesses. But SF needs to really examine what is going wrong and why they're incapable of solving their problems because somehow I have the suspicious that more money isn't going to solve everything. I mean, isn't SF one of the richest states in the world anyway?

> But SF needs to really examine what is going wrong and why they're incapable of solving their problems

Strong network effects.

San Francisco spends in excess of $34,000 per homeless per year already, with nothing to show for it except needles on streets.

Where's the money going? Who knows, probably a mix of graft and incompetence.

It would be amazing if that $34k was just handed out as cash for a month. I heard LA was spending $900k per person to build housing.

I'm a bit skeptical it is graft but imagine it is just the long tax inside a big bureaucracy that siphons a penny here and a penny there, all in service of codes and permits, and there you go, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars gone before it reaches the streets.

Imagine if those tax dollars were just handed back to people as cash. Starting to sound like basic income.

Most of the homeless in California are mentally ill, and (as a direct result) refusing medical treatment.

We used to forcibly put them in psychiatric wards, and many responded well to antipsychotics, etc.

That was deemed inhumane, so now we make them sleep on the streets, where they get assaulted, robbed and worse.

"many responded well to antipsychotics" citation needed because if there is something most humans don't do is respond well to antipsychotics. Especially because antipsychotics only work on a really really small subset of mental illnesses. What an uninformed comment.

Paranoid schizophrenia and manic depression are common among that group. The antipsychotics (or similar) help them distinguish reality from fantasy long enough to consent to further care.

There are many types of mental illness, but most don't (usually) lead to living on the streets in the long term.

Homelessness is mere reflection of massively risen drug epidemic. You cannot solve it simply by giving free housing etc. Even if you remove all homeless people today, you will see new ones arrive in short order.

Im sorry but your claims make very large assumptions, I have to ask that you provide something other than ethos. Where would new homeless people come from? Are all drug addicts homeless? Are all homeless people drug addicts?

Yes they may act in a way that you percieve them as being on drugs but often they are mentally ill.

Unfortunately, giving most visibly homeless people cash does not actually help them.

Sounds like a recipe for the cobra effect.

This is not about business taxes more generally. Every company in SF is subject to this tax but most haven’t left.

It specifically affects payments companies more because of how the revenue subject to taxation is calculated.

Apparently city elected officials have acknowledged it’s broken but also know it is not viable to cut any tech company’s taxes in this political environment. So they’re all leaving instead.

When government raises taxes to solve X, it is extremely rare that X gets solved.

And why would it anyway? Having problem X around is now provably profitable.

> I think in the USA this is particularly problematic because there's a huge different between moving from a country to another and moving from one state to another.

What's this problematic difference, exactly? Every American citizen is subject to taxes whether he moves to Iowa or Istanbul.

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