> are generally understood to have a civic responsibility to make contributions to their local community, above and beyond their tax obligations
Literally what taxes are for. If there are expectations that a company contributes to civic duties then make it a law and apply it equally.
Government should work on what the citizens should need. Having individual companies play it like a marketing game where the loudest voices get appeased is a very bad expectation. Decide what the people need centrally and apply tax dollars collected on a fair basis.
> but if it's true that OpenAI has made "less than a million dollars" in SF civic contributions
If you completely ignore all of the taxes paid by the corporations and their employees and also discount their civic contributions as not counting because the author of the op-ed doesn’t like them and therefore has decided they don’t count.
Even I can see why this game is unwinnable. The person writing this piece doesn’t understand how taxes work or the role of the government. They don’t even have great ideas for what would appease them. They just want to be angry at the current companies in the news and will move on to being angry at a different set of companies when the news cycle shifts in a few years.