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San Francisco Passes a First-of-its-Kind Tax on Big Businesses To Help the Homeless (recode.net)
San Francisco voters passed a measure that has divided the tech community and sparked a national debate about the industry's responsibility to fix the city's homelessness crisis. From a report: The San Francisco Chronicle called the race at 60 percent in favor with 99 percent of the vote counted. Proposition C will raise the city's gross receipts tax by an average of .5 percent on annual gross receipts over $50 million that companies like Square, Lyft and Salesforce generate. The new funds will bring in an estimated $250 million to $300 million a year -- twice what the city currently spends on an annual basis to help the homeless in tech's de facto capital. The thousands of people living on San Francisco's streets serve as a daily reminder of economic inequality in a city that has one of the highest concentrations of billionaires in the nation. Earlier this year, a United Nations expert on housing called the living conditions of the homeless in the Bay Area "cruel" and "unacceptable." The decision to increase funding for the city's most needy is a victory for the local nonprofits behind the measure and their tech fairy godfather, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, who, along with his company, has poured more than $7 million into the campaign in the month leading up to the election.
More corporate flight from California. Good.
You want to push more business out of your city, this is how you push more business out of your city.
Steeling someone else's money and redistributing it has always failed. This won't work out. The real cause is these people are all drug addicts.
In short, if you are homeless, get yourself to San Francisco any way you can. They are spending tons of money on the homeless.
Yup, next time I see someone homeless in my area, instead of giving them $5. I'll take them to the bus station and buy them a ticket to San Fran.
The way you treat others speaks a lot about yourself. These are people... so many people are just a few missed paychecks away from being homeless. Stop treating them like a scourge or like animals.
Where I live they go so far as to put concrete "spikes" to make flat areas unusable by the homeless.
This all starts from the "every zygote is sacred" mentality -- when you prevent abortion, someone has to pay for all the costs of supporting the resulting child. The more children, the more jobs are needed. That pushes more people to the bottom wages and increases living costs as more have to share.
These decisions are causing future problems -- and guess what? The future is now. It has been for many years.
When people have true control over their reproductive rights, fewer children are brought into society and those competitive costs decrease... which means fewer homeless people.
Anon because some religious cultists have attacked clinics and doctors in the past for simply helping people. Don't get me started on the fuckery that is religion and it's incredibly harmful effects on society.
Do a great job taking care of the homeless and your city will become a magnet for the homeless of the nation..
The hard part is defining "taking care of"... Handouts of food, clothing, gender reassignment operations, free recreational drugs and even just shelters for occasional bad SF weather don't help the homeless much but that's almost certainly what this new tax will help pay for. Most of them need medication (non-recreational) and supervised long term care and rehab. The rest need job training and/or an address to put on applications.
If Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is so morally great, why would he give $$ millions on campaign and to activists to tax other people instead of just giving the money to poor? It's always strange how rich people ask for tax increase on everyone else, they could give their money at any time, no new laws required.
Because they're more interested in appearing to care about an issue than actually fixing it. An increase in homelessness results in more power for the government, which means more government employees, which means more Salesforce licenses.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
...using those words, "economic inequality." Like they mean something. What should terrify you is economic equality. That means no one prospers, because everyone is equally poor and dependent on the state for every aspect of their life. It's called Socialism.
Throwing money at the homeless problem has not solved it. Clearly most of these people have mental health issues or drug/alcohol dependency issues. That means that appeals to rationality are not going to work, but relocation might. Allow cities to exclude people for bad behavior, and suddenly this becomes a non-issue.
In the meantime, every tax that we spend just makes government more intrusive in our lives, and puts us farther down the path that the Soviet Union explored. The more we depend on government, the weaker we get as individuals, until you end up with a lot of clueless people shrugging their way through life.
Alternative Right.
Yup, next time I see someone homeless in my area, instead of giving them $5. I'll take them to the bus station and buy them a ticket to San Fran.
Although you joke; New York has done just that. They've paid to have homeless people shipped elsewhere. Other than government intrusion though- homeless people don't tend to wander much- they're not going to go to SF unless someone does buy them a bus ticket.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
local taxes for a local issue. I do wonder what the results would be of an audit of how current funds related to this issue were spent. And if these new funds will be used well it is government after all. But good luck to them I think they might need it.
;)
Just my 2 cents
That's what we used to have, but there was a huge moral panic about the deplorable conditions in those facilities and public outcry lead to them being shut down. There's just no getting around the fact that people with severe mental health issues aren't going to behave like well adjusted human beings, but from a pure cost to society perspective, it's probably much cheaper to house them in sanatoriums than it is to run around putting out the small fires that arise when you leave them to wander the streets.
California collects GIGANTIC amounts of maoney and promptly wastes it.
That plus a lot of it is stuffed in to State Employee Pensions.
but it was extortion.
Seriously, why aren't people angry that they're constantly being threatened with economic disaster every time we do anything to upset our corporate overlords? Do we like being pushed around and told what to do?
Like I said on another thread, we didn't put up with this shit when the Mafia did it, why are we doing it now?
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That's what we used to have, but there was a huge moral panic about the deplorable conditions in those facilities and public outcry lead to them being shut down. There's just no getting around the fact that people with severe mental health issues aren't going to behave like well adjusted human beings, but from a pure cost to society perspective, it's probably much cheaper to house them in sanatoriums than it is to run around putting out the small fires that arise when you leave them to wander the streets.
Of course we still have these places-- lots of them. They're just not called "sanitoriums". They're called nursing homes, or IMD's (Institutions for Mental Disease), or ICF's (Intermediate Care Facilities), or other things.
You forgot Earthquakes.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
some homeless are veterans and we need to do better for them.
There were plenty of $0 down mortgages back in 2008. Do you know what happened afterwards?
If they got downpayment assistance and could move into homes then a job loss would mean they could still live in those homes while they go through a restructuring of their loans with the banks.
No, they would be foreclosed. This is much worse than if they rented an apartment and could move out of the area.
A lot of people in 2008 survived by living rent free in their foreclosed houses. If these folks had been renting the homelessness would have been much worse. banks did not move to take possession as noone was buying and if they did an eviction then they would have to pay to guard an empty house or have it vandalized.
People taking 0$ loans did not cause 2008. The Mortgage brokers reselling these loans as AAA in order to get big bonuses caused 2008. If 0$ loans MBS had been priced properly we wouldnt have had a bust.
**Life is too short to be serious**
The problem stems from the Reagan-era budget cuts closing down mental health institutions aka insane asylums. (Reagan-era because although Reagan spearheaded it, control of Congress was split at the time so it couldn't have been done without the cooperation of both parties.) The hope was to divest the Federal government from mental health care (it's not listed in the Constitution as a responsibility of the Federal government) and put it back in the hands of the states (the downside of the 10th Amendment for the states). But the states never picked up the ball.
Consequently, about 25% of the homeless are people with severe mental health issues (vs about 4% for the general population). Add to that about 30%-40% who are addicted to drugs or alcohol (vs 10% for the general population). The large prevalence of mentally ill and substance abusers among the homeless prejudices people against the homeless in general, making recovery harder for the about 50% who are homeless simply because they've hit a rough patch in their lives.
At a city or county level, it's usually cheaper to simply boot the homeless out than to really tackle the issue. But that doesn't reduce the rate of homelessness, it merely hides it from view (in those cities). Just like a burglar alarm may reduce the chances of your house being robbed, but doesn't reduce the overall burglary rate (the burglar flees your home and robs another house instead). The problem really needs to be addressed at the state or national level for an effective solution - geographic areas large enough that simply booting them out doesn't appear to be a solution to legislators.