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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.
Do a great job taking care of the homeless and your city will become a magnet for the homeless of the nation. If that's what you want, go for it. Cheaper to turn them all into Soylent Green, but, hey, democracy, and each city can have its own values.
Frankly, this is less odd and government-intrusive than most stuff SF does, and companies of course have the option of just excluding SF from their business if it's not worth the cost.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In short, if you are homeless, get yourself to San Francisco any way you can. They are spending tons of money on the homeless.
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.
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.
It's all right there in the summary:
1. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, along with his company, has poured more than $7 million into the campaign.
2. The new funds will bring in an estimated $250 million to $300 million a year.
So, a bit over 7 million was spent once to generate 250 to 300 million every year from now on. And even if it's repealed next year, it's a net gain of over 240 million for the homeless until then. The only way it would have been bad is if the law didn't pass, but it was a calculated move on his part. What you can do for the homeless with seven million is nothing compared to 250+ million.
#DeleteFacebook
How does "economic equality" translates to "everyone is poor"? That's a typical U.S.A. point of view.
#DeleteFacebook
California collects GIGANTIC amounts of maoney and promptly wastes it.
That plus a lot of it is stuffed in to State Employee Pensions.
in the Union. Always has been. Not because of taxes, but because people want to live there. The weather's fantastic. They get little or no natural disasters (occasional fire or mud slide, nothing like east coast gets). Great beaches. Lots of parks. And you've got tons and tons of amenities (great sports teams, Disney Land, fantastic schools, etc, etc).
We've had 40 years of offshoring and outsourcing. If the companies could leave they would have done so already. It's high time we Americans called their bluff. Wanna leave? Fine. Go. Door's right there. Don't let it hit you where the dog shoulda bit you. You can go home, but you can't take the ball. If you try, we'll eminent domain your ass. This is our country, and we're through letting you threaten us.
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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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It seems like after this new tax, California may be well in excess of spending $100k/homeless person per year. At what point does it make more sense to buy them all housing in one other state and pay for meals and everything in perpetuity?
From what I've seen though homeless people in California get pretty much nothing from all this money supposedly devoted to them. I'll bet if you looked over the people administering these programs you would find SO MUCH corruption...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
and don't do nearly as much damage as what Florida sees every 5-10 years.
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In the SF Bay area, the cost of homes are artificially high because the properties have changed hands so many times in the last decade--each time the price goes up from the agent and the banker. Now, we have large investment firms flipping houses, also driving up the costs. Here, we aren't making communities, we are making a collection of houses that few people own, which is exactly what the banks want.
On my street in Campbell, I've seen the same houses go $750,000 to over a $1,000,000 in less than 5 years. Even with two tech workers, it's not easy to pay that off.
The thing you won't be able to understand: a lot of the homeless in the SF Bay area, are blue-collar working people. People work to maintain the cities they often cannot afford to live in. This is also what happened in Orange County. The people who clean Irvine and Tustin Ranch live in Costa Mesa. What is also being built here seems a little like the old Science Fiction movie Metropolis.
Most of the traffic problems here are caused by single drivers going to work from where they can afford to work where they cannot afford to live.
There is also an attitude here that people don't believe how rich they are, which is caused by the high property. If you make $40,000 year, you might not be able to afford a 2-bedroom apartment here.
There are a few simple solutions:
1.) If you buy a house, you must keep it and live in for 5 years--unless you get divorced or show bankruptcy. This makes property homes and communities and not investment tokens.
2.) Zone more areas for apartments.
3.) Stop outlawing poverty and homelessness. Homelessness is an equal-opportunity affliction. This means no more police harassment.
4.) Give people a place to shower and go to the bathroom. It's not only the homeless people who need to use bathrooms. Pregnant women and men with prostate problems have to go more, too.
6.) Let people sleep in their cars.
7.) Make sure that homeless people can vote.
8.) Make social workers live as homeless people for 1 month before giving them jobs--on the lowest benefit afforded to the homeless people.
9.) Build small pod-hotels for the homeless people, like they have in Japan.
10.) Offer wash-machines for homeless people. If people can was their clothes, then they don't need to carry as much with them.
11.) Require that the "Salvation Army" either give homeless people clothes--or give up their non-profit status.
12.) Give more money to help the homeless, and get that money from reduced administration. It takes a lot of money in administration costs to deny people help.
13.) Consider giving 1/4th of the tax money to help a homeless person that might otherwise be spent to keep someone in jail.
14.) Give homeless people carts and storage solutions but expect them to organize their stuff. Riding along the Los Gatos Creek trail, I've seen homeless camps that where a shambles, but I also saw a well organized one, with signs of cottage industry.
15.) Few if any social programs have any kind of meaningful feedback. All social interviews should have a program in social worker performance review sheet. Are the programs working? Was the interviewer fair?
The problems surrounding homelessness won't get fixed unless the people involved run. As far as I know, the only politician around here gives a damn about the homeless--was himself homeless as a child when his families home burned down.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
some homeless are veterans and we need to do better for them.
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.