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It's genuinely fascinating how San Francisco “progresssives” have somehow aligned themselves with the car industry in their opposition to funding mass transit (lemmy.zip)
submitted 2 weeks ago by to c/fuckcars@lemmy.world
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Her plan: "Don't punish poor people with taxes to fund transit. Punish poor people by dismantling transit waiting for the perfect funding scheme"

This is literally the exact same playbook billionaires used to kill a transit tax referendum in Nashville:

https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2018/04/23/koch-brothers-group-begins-ad-blitz-against-nashville-transit-referendum-week-vote/543421002/

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[–] 33 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (4 children)

But we already have a viable funding scheme, tax the billionaires class. There's no shortage of tech billionaires in Silicon Valley (which is part of San Fancisco) that would be a fantastic source of tax revenue.

Edit: I stand corrected, Silicon Valley is near SF technically not in SF. Still plenty of billionaires there to tax.

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  • [–] 10 points 2 weeks ago

    Tech money sets up shop around SF so they can avoid the big city laws and take advantage of small town politics. Mountain View, Palo Alto, Atherton - all the places the big money goes are places SF can't tax.

    SF doesn't have the money people think it does. It struggles to collect from businesses and doesn't want to fuck up what is working in their economy. However the politicians have been convinced that the rich are the pillar of the economy and they don't want to challenge that working economy. None of the politicians actually know how tech makes money but they see the money flowing through tech and kowtow.

    The end result is a city that doesn't want to tax the people with all the money and work to keep those super rich happy.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

    Maybe viable, but it doesn't exist. In the end when PT is getting disfunded it makes no difference what would be theoretically viable. I am all for taxing billionares, that can also replace other fundings anytime but until then it is like shooting yourself in the foot to disfund such critical infrastructure.

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