Comment by boulos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by boulos | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> Did tech companies decide to start paying more taxes? Did the city start spending more? No, the actual cause is boring and simple, but makes anti-establishment folks very uncomfortable.

We did pass gross receipts taxes and do tax payroll for larger businesses. So yes, companies pay more taxes than 2015 (though they didn't choose to) and our budget per person in inflation adjusted terms is up:

  A $16 billion question: How did San Francisco’s budget get so huge?

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/city-budget-16-billio...

A lot of that is from "self-supporting" segments including SFO.

We had 7 years of budgets with that tax before things got better, so it seems unlikely this made the situation better. In fact it seems to have made things much worse.

The percentages and methodology changed over time though (this was the big argument between Benioff and Dorsey, since gross receipts ignoring business model and margins hit very differently).

Same thing the large transfer tax changes, vacancy taxes, etc. The inflation adjusted budget is definitely higher.

I think we are not disputing the same claim. I claim the city is much better now than 1 year ago, and spending more cannot explain that difference because large increases in spending did not happen 1 year ago and have not helped in the past.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com