To fund currently unfunded pension liabilities? To hire more city employees at above-market rates? To build new parks and roads? To fund public transportation?
The money will be used for what it always is - some of it will be good and some of it won't be very good. Once it's in the pot, it gets stirred around and all sorts of people and projects get a full bowl. That's not what's interesting about this story - taxes get raised all the time by all sorts of authorities. What's interesting is that the tax is full of perverse incentives and may very well lead to lower, not higher tax receipts.
Why is this not interesting to you? Just because it's the status quo of how things are done doesn't make it less of an issue to me. Maybe if we knew what pot of taxes were used for what causes, we could reason about their worthiness better. Just raising taxes for the sake of raising taxes seems like a meaningless and potentially regressive goal otherwise.
> What's interesting is that the tax is full of perverse incentives and may very well lead to lower, not higher tax receipts.
These things can both be interesting.
> “We need the wealth that has been generated in the city to be shared more broadly with workers and residents”
This person seems to assume the taxes will be shared with the workers and residents. Would they still support these taxes if that were not the case?
Others (in this discussion) seem to think the taxes will be thrown at things that don't benefit the city. Maybe so? Would they be more supportive if they knew it was for something they believed in?
Unfortunately, now we live in a world where we just talk about taxation for the sake of putting money into the pot and have no real idea or influence over how that pot of money is spent. A government that can move towards this Benjamin Franklin kind of simplicity of taxes would make its country such a better place.
Article I found about it: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-07-02-01...