For one, you’re not paying the Starbucks employee so they can be consumers out of the goodness of your heart. They’re charging what you’ll pay because that is capitalism.
If you don’t want to pay the Starbucks employee, you don’t have to. You can go brew your own coffee, but you probably figure $2 isn’t worth your time so instead you’d rather just pay them for the convenience.
The other great thing about all this is if you don’t like how San Francisco wants to tax you, you can leave. And it’s not even like leaving the country or even leaving the state. You don’t actually even lost anything of substance.
There is a reason tax havens exist. And why socialist Europe has Riviera and why we have Jackson Hole. It’s this jealousy towards elitism that’s creating WIDE gaps in inequality.
There will always be inequality. What we need to offer is opportunity for the willing and ambitious. Slamming it as ‘elitism’ is shaming the ones have what we don’t.
This is ruinous. We should instead create a more driven and ambitious society. Not one that wants a piece of someone else’s cake. Starting with..stop shaming the rich. And stop taxing them.
I want the rich to love obscene gorgeous insanely hedonistic lives. Because such a lifestyle will infuse spending and profit back into our economy.
If we socialize education and then young people and then the middle aged who can’t find affordable homes and yet need to be home owners and then the retired public sector community. And then special groups. Who is left? I guess the ones who are actually paying more into the system than they are taking out. It’s like the oxen that plows an entire field with the poor farmer whipping it’s hide. Why not?
All the jobs out there except a handful are fluff jobs with no real production value. Yes, I am glad someone is making my latte at Starbucks but at the end of the day, I am also paying for that. To maintain jobs so that everyone can be employed. As the pandemic proved, we can do without Starbucks. The value of most of the non productive job is to provide the public a wage so they can be consumers to purchase from the producers. Like smart phones. Or a car. See the pattern?
So all this cultivated vote base need to be cared for and fed. This is when you bleed the tiny tech community by injecting them with guilt and self loathing for being b productive and wealthy. This is usually done with clickbaitey articles and outrage porn publishing farms and social justice yellers.
Now you have a large vote bank that will keep voting yes to taxing the tiny little taxable sector(many of whom probably don’t even vote if tech employees come as immigrants and are not voting citizens).
San Francisco keeps throwing money at problems that don’t get solved because it’s not their money. When there are 12 people in the room and the vote is yes or no for taxing just the top two wage earners in the group, why should it be surprising that it’s at least 10-12 for YES on taxation.