As someone who lives in the heart of Silicon Valley, there are HUGE downsides to letting industry write their own tax law / loopholes and playing one jurisdiction against the other for special tax incentives.
The local governments in this area are mostly starved of funds, despite having the world’s largest companies who pay their executives and rare talent among the highest compensation in the world.
The big tech companies can afford to hire private security with staff larger than the local police departments.
And they NEED that security to keep the homeless people in tents and broke down RVs from parking on their property.
The homeless and jobless end up breaking into the houses of everyone who can’t afford private security. If they don’t become thieves or druggies, then they are a broken husk of a person.
When companies don’t like the neighborhood, they pick up and move to the next hot city and the cycle repeats there.
This isn’t the fault of big tech alone, but don’t pretend like the US has figured out how to balance society and taxation.
The last thing CA or SF are is starved of revenue.
Lack of effective utilization of said revenue is by far the issue here, as can be seen by looking at peer states/cities/countries spending analogous amounts of money.
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As someone who lives in the heart of Silicon Valley, there are HUGE downsides to letting industry write their own tax law / loopholes and playing one jurisdiction against the other for special tax incentives.
The local governments in this area are mostly starved of funds, despite having the world’s largest companies who pay their executives and rare talent among the highest compensation in the world.
The big tech companies can afford to hire private security with staff larger than the local police departments.
And they NEED that security to keep the homeless people in tents and broke down RVs from parking on their property.
The homeless and jobless end up breaking into the houses of everyone who can’t afford private security. If they don’t become thieves or druggies, then they are a broken husk of a person.
When companies don’t like the neighborhood, they pick up and move to the next hot city and the cycle repeats there.
This isn’t the fault of big tech alone, but don’t pretend like the US has figured out how to balance society and taxation.
The last thing CA or SF are is starved of revenue.
Lack of effective utilization of said revenue is by far the issue here, as can be seen by looking at peer states/cities/countries spending analogous amounts of money.