San Francisco voters approve new taxes for wealthy CEOs and tech companies | San Francisco

In an effort to handle financial disparity laid naked by the coronavirus pandemic, San Francisco voters overwhelmingly authorized a number of tax measures concentrating on property homeowners and large companies with CEOs paid far larger than their common staff.

Underneath the brand new regulation, any firm whose high govt earns 100 occasions greater than their common employee pays an additional 0.1% surcharge on its annual enterprise tax fee. If a CEO makes 200 occasions greater than the common worker, the surcharge will increase to 0.2%; 300 occasions will get a 0.3% surcharge and so forth.

Voters additionally agreed to sweeping enterprise tax modifications that can result in a better tax price for a lot of tech corporations, and a better switch tax on property gross sales valued between $10m and $25m.

“We’re not gonna shed any tears if penthouse dwellers need to cough up,” the San Francisco League of Pissed Off Voters wrote in its voter information.

The outcomes “present that San Franciscans are involved about rising financial inequality”, metropolis Supervisor Matt Haney, the writer of the measure titled the Overpaid Government Tax, mentioned on Wednesday. “The very rich are gaining increasingly more. They’ve gotten a lot richer through the pandemic, whereas everybody else has remained stagnant.

“We want the wealth that has been generated within the metropolis to be shared extra broadly with staff and residents,” he mentioned.

Critics name the surcharge a blatant try at redistribution of wealth and criticized elevating enterprise taxes in the midst of a recession.

Since March, Covid-19 restrictions have shut down essential components of San Francisco’s economic system. Vacationers are scarce, and legions of staff in tech and within the metropolis’s essential enterprise and monetary districts have left, capable of work remotely from anyplace. Workplace emptiness charges went up whereas rents within the prohibitively costly metropolis dropped to their lowest in years.

“The center of pandemic-fueled shutdown is the improper time to lift taxes,“ mentioned Jim Wunderman, president and CEO of the enterprise advocacy group Bay Space Council. “The drip, drip, drip of recent normal taxes goes to erode the already shaky foundations of native economies decimated by the worst downturn in generations.”

The CEO tax is anticipated to generate between $60m and $140m per 12 months, and Haney mentioned he desires many of the cash directed in direction of well being companies. He dismisses fears that the surcharge will drive corporations out of the town, saying the tax was modest compared to the price of shifting a enterprise. He mentioned he hoped the tax would drive corporations to re-examine their compensation construction and can finally be adopted on a nationwide degree.

The tax is considerably much like an executive-pay surcharge handed by the town council in Portland, Oregon, almost 4 years in the past. San Francisco metropolis leaders thought-about the concept a number of years in the past, and a 2014 state proposal to decrease taxes for corporations whose executives have been paid lower than 100 occasions the median employee didn’t move within the California legislature.

“The concept didn’t get loads of traction as a result of individuals in San Francisco didn’t really feel it made sense to tax CEOs,“ political advisor Jim Ross mentioned. “However now you’re seeing an enormous segregation between the have and have-nots as executives get absurdly paid whereas others are struggling.”