San Francisco voters are about to decide whether the city's highest-paid executives start writing bigger checks to City Hall — and, unsurprisingly, both sides are throwing real money at the fight. Welcome to San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily. I'm Cassidy, alongside Devin — and today we're on Prop D, the CEO pay ratio tax, as it heads into the final stretch before voters weigh in. This has been brewing for years — the idea that if your CEO makes hundreds of times what your median worker makes, the city gets a cut. The question is whether that's smart policy, or just a tax that makes people feel good while jobs head for the door. We've got the arguments, the money behind them, and what this would actually do to the city's budget — all of that is coming up. Here's Brad Hamilton at AOL:
With San Francisco facing a massive budget deficit, voters are being asked whether the city's largest companies should pay more. Supporters say Prop D will save services, while opponents say it will hurt the already struggling business community.
Prop D is hitting the voters in June, and both sides are in full closing-argument mode. Supporters say it helps plug a massive budget hole; opponents say the business community is already on the ropes. This is the June-ballot version of the same old fight: services on one side, employer pressure on the other. And I'll say it plainly — a CEO pay ratio tax sounds righteous until you remember San Francisco has been inventing new ways to tax companies for two decades and still can't balance a budget. At some point, you have to look at the spending side. That's fair pushback, but the fact that 'largest companies pay more' polls well doesn't make it wrong. It means voters are staring at libraries and Muni cuts and want someone to foot the bill. The real question is whether this is the right tool, or just the most satisfying one. If San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily helps you keep up with the city, please subscribe and leave a quick review wherever you're listening. It really does help other people find the show.
We've put links to all the stories from today's briefing in the show notes, so if there's one you want to spend more time with, you'll find it there.
That's San Francisco Politics and Urbanism Daily for this Monday. This is a Lantern Podcast.