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Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

More taxes are not the answer. In California, government employees get paid far more there than any other state and vs their private sector counterparts, have enormous pensions and are now the predominant members of the middle class in California. They live off the riches of the tech sector like the Saudis live off oil and benefit massively from prop 13 and other tax breaks. Peter Thiel did a great analysis of this.

https://thepostmillennial.com/peter-thiel-on-the-tech-curse-...

Besides, more tax revenue would make California worse. San Francisco used its huge tech windfall to spend $300 million a year on not that many homeless people. It did create a lot of those sweet government jobs and cost plus contracts though. All these government workers are now reliant on homelessness continuing to be a problem.

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Reminds me of Spain. When public workers start to get more than private, bad things will start to happen.

First: a bigger interest in intervention and keeping the system to keep votes.

I know California has had a super strong economy but... if you go down this road it will be a matter of time. Even if it is decades.

The problem with this is that once it starts it makes for a vicious circle that gets bigger and bigger and the ones who pay the increasing bills (private economy) get eventually pissed and leave.

I heard many companies moving to Texas/Florida for having an increase in the tax that corporations pay.

A democracy functions up until the people learn they can vote themselves rations from the larder, money from the treasury.

Curious, did you live through that era in Spain? Do you have some stories to share?

Driving now but stay tuned.

I'm interested in hearing too.

It's not more taxes, it's a redistribution of taxes.

I.e. get rid of the property tax exemptions but lower the income tax (or the sales tax).

The argument here is not that taxes are too low or too high, it's that they are inefficient (they subsidize the wrong thing).

I just thought of something, but it's too late to edit the above comment. In San Francisco they have a sanctioned open air drug market. It doesn't make much sense if you're trying to get these people off drugs, but if you are trying to preserve the homeless people in their current patterns of dysfunction as clients for the bloated city government and provide a jobs program for social workers and government contractors, it makes tons of sense!

And that’s exactly what happens. What could you do if you gave every homeless in SF a cut of the 300MM? They’d all be fed and clothed and able to rend low income housing. But that’s not what happens. Some agency is spun up to manage the funds and sucks 90% of them away to pay for op ex.

Oh no people working for the government are doing well! The misery!

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