San Francisco Sends Problematic Gross Receipts Tax to November Ballot

I still have no idea why SF went with a gross receipts tax vs. an income tax. I don't like paying taxes, but an SF-specific income tax (business and personal, including people who commute in) does seem a lot more fair than either payroll or gross receipts.

The argument against income tax is that it's hard to administer, but in SF, they can just piggyback off the free tax returns from US IRS and CA FTB. To make the correct income, it could probably be something like 0.1% or less.

This is surprising because the proponents of this tax (SF.Citi, Ron Conway et al) are really smart.

(One of the only bad things about Washington State is the B&O tax, which I also think should be replaced with another form of tax making at least the same revenue, although at the state level, there's an argument about collection and administration cost. Still, they can just piggyback on the federal returns, or even better, just raise sales and property tax, or other inexpensive to collect taxes.)