San Francisco's CEO pay tax is heading to voters, and the last-minute lobbying is getting loud. Welcome to The San Francisco Daily Fix. I'm Cassidy, alongside Devin, and today we're digging into Prop D — the measure that would tax companies where the CEO makes way more than the average worker. Both sides are throwing real money at this, and I have thoughts. 'Tax the rich' sounds great until you ask whether it actually helps anybody making rent in this city. We'll get into who's pushing it, who's fighting back, and what the policy actually does. Stay with us. 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 on the June ballot. It's a tax on San Francisco's largest companies, built around executive pay, and it's supposed to close part of the city's very real budget deficit. Both sides are in full sprint heading into the final stretch. This is the closing-arguments phase of the whole June ballot money fight — services versus pressure on employers — and honestly, that framing drives me crazy. The city has a spending discipline problem as much as a revenue problem, and nobody wants to say it out loud. To be fair, the deficit is real, and if nothing passes, cuts are going to hit working-class San Franciscans first. The question is whether a CEO-pay-ratio tax is the right lever, or whether it speeds up the corporate exodus we've spent three years trying to reverse. If the measure is tight enough to hit genuinely large firms and not some blunt instrument that clips mid-size companies trying to grow here, I could live with it. But San Francisco has a long history of passing taxes that sound great on the flyer and quietly hemorrhage jobs afterward. You'll find links to everything we covered today in the show notes, so if a story stuck with you, that's the place to dig in a little more.
That's The San Francisco Daily Fix for this Monday. Thanks for listening. This is a Lantern Podcast.