San Francisco's Ultrarich Are Blocking a Zohran-Style Agenda

Rant BEGIN: Dean Preston is a maniac in my personal experience having talked with him on the street while he was first campaigning -- before he served his first term. He laughed wildly at something frank and simple that I said, when he tried to talk to me about how he was so cool and how people should vote for him. I basically said no I don't want to talk to you and that I was busy. I remember it being an out of place kind of thing as if he sort of didn't care that I was busy? It was odd. Should I be happy that he laughed at me for being myself? Anyhow, Preston is is not someone who I have any reason to trust. END

San Francisco politics are complicated. There is a lot of appeasing and stuff that's done for show, to try and and curry favor from the various highly ideological and disunited, often impractical population segments. Getting nothing done while complaining about it seems to be an art in my opinion that ... what is it, city council, participates in. Boldly proposing impossible plans or shutting things down.

Just because ex-mayor Breed vetoed something doesn't mean that the moneyed rich are THE PROBLEM. SF during Breed's term had a lot of negative growth as the pandemic, extremely cheap fentanyl plus a very aggressive fentanyl user base, and work from home making ghost towns out of business and mixed business/residential neighborhoods, strangulated city operations, making for an extra stressful operations challenge for the mayor's office in my opinion.

This article is under-researched and / or highly opinionated, in my opinion.

The article could be much better, if it were more factually accurate about "conclusions" and less biased towards any particular political goal. I do like the the article is overtly biased and is not hiding its bias.

The longer we let SF be run by the ultra rich the worst it will get. Maybe when all the rich leave it will finally it rock bottom and the people will be able to pass the reforms needed to get the city back on the right track.

got hit with a pop-up that said my device had a virus halfway through this otherwise interesting read. Good luck

> if the government could provide something like a universal basic income for unemployed people when the economy was flatlining, could they not afford it during boom times

What happened when the government started writing stimulus checks? Assets inflated greatly. Meme coins became a thing and scammy crypto currencies and JPEGs shot up. Some people were paid more in benefits than they made working prolonging inflation. About 68% of unemployed workers received benefits that were greater than their lost earnings [0]. Pretty soon the stock market was about 20% higher than it was pre-covid.

If you were to ask economists or anyone with a basic grasp of reality how the stock market should react with a global pandemic and shutdown, most would say it should adjust down, not shoot up 20% from pre-pandemic levels. It was obviously the money printing. To be fair, the money printing wasn't 100% given to people directly, but nearly $2 trillion was income assistance and direct payment [1] and other measures had similar effects in that they resulted in money in people's pocket, more than they had lost. That money fueled the asset bubble.

Fast forward a few years, and the result was double digit inflation that we're still working through. Not a resounding win as the dem-socialists would have you believe.

> "Could we have a Zohran in San Francisco?”

I'm pretty sure San Fransisco has many of the same policies Zohran promotes like rent control and soft on crime like social workers rather than police, drug legalization and acceptance of "minor" shoplifting. They also have some of the highest tax rates in the country. Combined city and county sales tax rate is 8.625% + an additional 12.3% for CA [2]

The article mentions free buses and tax on vacant properties, but is that the biggest problem? Bus fares? I feel like this whole post is an incredible exercise in gaslighting.

[0] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/many-americans-are-gett...

[1] https://www.covidmoneytracker.org/

[2] https://cdtfa.ca.gov/taxes-and-fees/rates.aspx