
Salesforce CEO: tech billionaires 'hoard their money' and won't help homeless - apengwin
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/17/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-san-francisco-homeless-interview
======
dymk
The current budget is $300 million per year for homeless relief in SF. There's
approximately 8000 homless in SF.

300000000 / 8000 => $37,500 per individual per year.

How is the problem getting _so much worse_ with almost $40k per year being
spent on _each_ individual homeless person? Where is that money going? How are
these programs so inefficient that $40k spent on bulk relief is ineffective?

Why does anyone think that just increasing that number per person is going to
solve anything, without a detailed plan about how to spend it?

Given the above, it's entirely rational to oppose Prop C, which doesn't
provide details, transparency, or accountability about how the money will be
spent.

~~~
jaggederest
Many of the most severe users of multiple systems are astronomically
expensive. Almost $100k/yr per person. It's emergency room visits that aren't
paid for, ambulance time, nurses, doctors, surgery, helicopter rides to trauma
centers, everything.

It's not effective because it doesn't address any of the root problems. It
just patches the person up and sends them out again, until they have another
heart attack or psychotic break and end up running up another hospital bill.

[http://www.counties.org/sites/main/files/file-
attachments/pd...](http://www.counties.org/sites/main/files/file-
attachments/pdf_distribute_hums_overview_2014_rev_110514.pdf)

Blatant plug: The folks at RideAlong are trying to solve these problems and
they're hiring. I had a chance to work with them very briefly and they are
really engaged and committed to solving these kinds of problems. YC alums too.
[https://getridealong.com/about-us/](https://getridealong.com/about-us/)

~~~
theptip
Is that report actually referring to homeless? Looks like just "high users of
multiple systems", which could include someone who has accommodation (e.g.
family member's house) but is bankrupted by healthcare costs.

~~~
jaggederest
They're largely homeless, from what I know, and virtually all don't have what
I'd consider secure housing, depending on how you define that, but yeah,
you're right.

------
ghobs91
While I don't doubt billionaires hoard money, I think trying to solve this
with taxes is misguided. They should look at the stats showing how many
homeless ended up in that situation because of rising rents.

I'd be willing to bet NIMBY antics are a large cause of this problem. SF metro
area has the 4th highest rate of homeless people per capita, I have to imagine
absurdly high rents is a part of it.

SF politicians don't want to admit this because of the donations/support they
receive from NIMBY groups, but they are very clearly the cause of many
problems in the bay area, whether its housing or slow transit expansion. It's
especially ironic that such a "progressive" area would be so rife with elitism
and gate keeping.

~~~
i_am_nomad
If someone can’t afford rent in SF, they have other options besides living on
the streets. For example, they can move somewhere cheaper.

The homeless in San Francisco are mostly people who can’t afford to live
anywhere because they are incapable of generating or maintaining anything of
monetary value. Rents could fifty bucks a month and they’d still be on the
streets. The problem, then, is how to take care of those people.

~~~
ghobs91
There will always be a percentage of homeless that are as you say, usually
because of mental illness. To say "most" of them fall into that category is a
huge assumption to make without data to back it up.

~~~
i_am_nomad
I think most rational and competent people would choose sharing an apartment
in Bakersfield over living on the streets in San Francisco.

~~~
AstralStorm
Some people are not competent or rational.

And you cannot get a decent job without a place to live, which also puts
pressure on bankruptcies. You cannot share an apartment when you have a family
or when you cannot afford even that.

------
theptip
Wikipedia says there are ~7k homeless people in SF [1]. We are spending
$250m/year [2]. That's $35k per person. At $3k/mo we could be housing everyone
at market rate in SF studios, or housing them somewhere cheaper plus paying
them a basic income to cover food & clothing.

I may be thinking about this wrong, but it seems like doubling our spend might
be a bad idea when we're doing so badly with what we're spending already.
(Interested in input from folks that actually know how these numbers compare
to other cities' spending).

However if we're actually doing well with the money we're spending (e.g.
comparison to other cities is favourable) then absolutely let's increase the
spend. I'm a little suspicious about the "let's tax the tech companies"
mentality though; why not just a progressive individual income tax? (Or a
moratorium on tax breaks for companies?) If we treat the tech companies like a
piggy bank, then we'll eventually drive them away, and the whole region will
be much less well off.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Franci...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_San_Francisco_Bay_Area#San_Francisco)
[2]: [https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million-
incre...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/29-million-increase-for-
San-Francisco-12902707.php)

------
ForrestN
'Benioff also criticized Stripe, a payment platform and another major San
Francisco tech firm opposing Prop C. The company claimed the measure lacked a
“comprehensive plan” for spending in a recent op-ed and has also given more
than $400,000 to a campaign fighting the measure, making it the largest
donor.'

As a company with deep connections to HN, I for one hope that the Stripe staff
active here are doing everything they can to challenge this embarrassing
activity by their company. A good start would be to publicly express your
opinion about this sort of lobbying here on HN.

These companies benefit hugely from government subsidies in various forms, and
really the least they could do is abstain from using their tremendous power
and resources to manipulate the government into making decisions that favor
their bottom lines.

The Stripe founders are entitled to whatever backwards, selfish position they
want to take, but they shouldn't be spending $400,000 on behalf of the company
(a community of people) to try to buy a given policy outcome.

More broadly, it's sad that even the progressive mayor feels the need to make
policy decisions based on fear that massively wealthy tech firms will punish
the city if they ask them to pay a slightly fairer share of shared expenses.
What we need is a cultural change, away from "anything that drives profit is
justifiable" to "successful companies that side with their own profits against
the public interest should be ashamed."

~~~
hueving
They are well within reason to lobby against policies they see as more
destructive to the business community than the claimed net benefit. If you
want an example of why you can't whimsically tax businesses for whatever you
want, look at what happened to the yacht building industry in the US. Idiotic
taxation destroyed it and cost thousands of jobs and millions in lost tax
revenue.

You can simultaneously be for fixing homelessness and be against destructive
taxation of an industry.

>they ask them to pay a slightly fairer share

Let me stop you there. Your notion of calling this a "fairer share" is
completely subjective and political. Why isn't a 99% tax of all profits fair,
why not 0%? The phrase "paying their fair share" is nothing more than a
baseless appeal to emotion, unless you're literally suggesting everyone pay
the same amount for services they use. However, given that you are advocating
raising taxes on entities already paying vastly more than the bottom 1/3rd, I
strongly doubt you actually want equal taxation.

~~~
ForrestN
We're talking about politics, and I'm saying that Stripe should be ashamed of
themselves. That's an inherently subjective and political claim. If you want
to structure society and government according to empirics, well, good luck
with that. An appeal to emotion doesn't have to be baseless.

The broader tax environment in the United States is leading to growing income
inequality. There are other countries with successful economies who tax the
highest earners much more than we do. In my subjective opinion, fairness
requires those who have been lucky enough to become rich to pay more taxes
than they do in the U.S. at the moment. If it were up to me, companies who
resist paying more taxes while their founders become overnight billionaires
should be made to feel ashamed of doing so, hopefully driving up the cost of
acting contemptibly toward their surrounding community by making it harder for
them to hire. My subjective belief is that the problem of homelessness is
worth spending more money on, and that it's really the least these companies
can do to sit out of taxation debates.

Having $400,000 to spend manipulating public opinion is having a thumb on the
scale. The ideal of democracy is not that whoever has the most power should
have the loudest voice.

~~~
jdmichal
> The ideal of democracy is not that whoever has the most power should have
> the loudest voice.

The ideal of democracy is that everyone has an equal vote, no matter how loud
their voice. Anything else is basically reminiscent of _Harrison Bergeron_.
[0]

(And, in this case, the entity with a voice here does not even have a vote!
Though its individual workers and owners and stakeholders do.)

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Bergeron)

~~~
ForrestN
The concept of “personhood” for corporations has really done a number in the
collective consciousness.

------
Zhenya
I literally spit on my keyboard:

A yes vote is a vote in favor of authorizing the city and county of San
Francisco to fund housing and homelessness services by taxing certain
businesses at the following rates: 0.175 percent to 0.69 percent on gross
receipts for businesses with over $50 million in gross annual receipts, or 1.5
percent of payroll expense for certain businesses with over $1 billion in
gross annual receipts and administrative offices in San Francisco

If your business is low margin, high gross collectibles, this will KILL your
business.

Transaction and retail companies will get murdered.

~~~
CydeWeys
It's very strange to see a tax written against gross income, not net income.
When did this start becoming a thing?

~~~
refurb
Weird indeed. What happens if the company had $100M in revenue, but a $10M
loss?

Are they expected to take out a loan to pay the tax?

~~~
rchaud
They work with the taxman to figure out a payment plan over time. Tax payments
can be deferred under GAAP, and also by the IRS if the entity isn't able to
pay.

------
acchow
This tax is supposed to generate $250-300 million per year. This is a crazy
amount of money for a 47 sq mile city with 885k people.

Say you hand out this $300 million to people. Without building any more
housing, this would clearly just raise rental prices with almost no change in
homelessness.

Say you try to build 1000 new units of housing and pay out $300 million to the
jobs created in that process. The people with these new jobs being given this
$300m would drive up rental prices and shift a different group of people onto
the street who can't afford the higher costs anymore.

Suppose you have rent control to try to avoid that shift. Then where will the
people doing these newly created jobs live? There's a housing shortage
throughout the entire bay area. They will probably have to commute huge
distances.

You can't just build housing for homeless. You need to build more housing for
everything else in the chain too.

~~~
Retric
~25$ per person per month for a city as rich as SF does not seem like a crazy
amount of money to me.

------
pg_bot
I think Benioff's biggest character flaw is that he doesn't do any analysis
past the point where it supports his political position. Instead of
understanding the root cause of the problem he has his solution in hand and
castigates anyone else who disagrees.

Prop C is bad public policy because it does nothing to prevent homelessness,
which is what San Franciscans should care most about. The homeless problem has
been caused by the government distorting the housing marketplace. Allow people
to build housing and get rid of rent control and the problem will solve
itself.

I think Benioff should be open to listening to other people instead of being
so adversarial.

------
kenferry
Because I looked it up: the sf chronicle endorses "no" on prop C (so opposite
of Benioff).

[https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2018/november-elections-
gui...](https://projects.sfchronicle.com/2018/november-elections-guide/)

------
jarjoura
Progressives in the city are quick to demonize Breed for calling out that the
proposition doesn't add any kind of accountability to the funds. Yet, I bet if
the proposition added a 1% sales tax, or general city tax applied to all
residents, suddenly those same progressives would go silent.

It's so easy to sit on your butts and complain that Dorsey and the Collisons
aren't doing more to help the homeless, but then to not call out SF's shitty
non-profit grant system that makes the current funds hard to trace. Trust me,
every single person in this city would be all over a concrete plan to fix the
problem. I just don't think taxing the biggest businesses is going to do
anything except make it more expensive to run your business in SF.

------
refurb
The one thing I don’t like is how when someone becomes super rich, suddenly
their opinion becomes super important.

Benioff’s opinions are no more important than your next door neighbor’s.

Even though Benioff May be worth billions, he still only has one vote.

------
jlmorton
Link (PDF) to the City's economic analysis of Proposition C:
[https://sfcontroller.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Econo...](https://sfcontroller.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Economic%20Analysis/hgrt_economic_impact_final.pdf).

------
bfrog
While my large metro center has homeless, compared to the west coast cities
its nothing. It was a humanitarian crisis 10 years ago. Today its a caste
system.

------
taurath
One of the primary properties of the tech boom (and, lets face it, almost all
industrialized capitalism) is that it doesn't account for nor take
responsibility for side effects of their overwhelming wealth. Some are even
convinced that its a net positive and nothing should be done - despite the
fact that the winners are investors and the upper class employees, and the
losers are those adjacent who have to move 2 hours away. Maybe shame will get
some people to budge, but I think the decision makers such as Jack/etc are so
far away from being able to empathize with the people that are harmed that
there's no real chance.

Also slightly amusing: Jack doesn't think that this is the "best" way to solve
homelessness. Whats the best way, since clearly he knows about it, and why
isn't he doing it?

~~~
Kalium
> Also slightly amusing: Jack doesn't think that this is the "best" way to
> solve homelessness. Whats the best way, since clearly he knows about it, and
> why isn't he doing it?

I mean, it's pretty obvious that the best way to address homelessness involves
having _homes_ so that the most vulnerable of our friends and neighbors can
stop _being homeless_ by being in _homes_. This idea has given rise to an
approach called Housing First. Which, by an odd twist of fate, has actually
been shown to work!

This being San Francisco, this is utterly impossible. Nothing makes San
Francisco politics break out in furious community meetings and protests and
CEQA complaints like the prospect of building things. There's nothing Jack can
do about that, even with all his money.

As near as I can tell, San Francisco doesn't actually want to solve this
problem. Instead, it wants to feel good about how kind and compassionate its
policies are without actually accepting change into the city's fabric.

~~~
rchaud
> Jack doesn't think that this is the "best" way to solve homelessness. Whats
> the best way, since clearly he knows about it, and why isn't he doing it?

This is by far the most irritating thing about reading CEO's "success story"
profiles. It's always about going to market with the MVP, because if you wait
long enough to make it perfect, the opportunity is lost to a competitor.

But when it comes to tax policy, the plan has to be perfect and not annoy
anyone and anything less should be rejected outright.

~~~
Kalium
For my part, I think it's worth considering that how perfect a plan has to be
to implement should be a function of how readily it can be adjusted to match
changing requirements. An MVP SaaS product is pretty tunable.

It's possible that local tax policies, particularly as mandated by and only
changeable by plebiscite, might be slightly more difficult to adjust (win an
election, get one chance every two years) to changing requirements or to
handle undesirable effects.

~~~
rchaud
You're right, it's far from a perfect analogy. And the electoral cycle means
that the tax might not be in place long enough for it to make a measurable
impact. My comment was more about the way in which taxes are discussed in
American political discourse; there is this implication of a rigid permanence,
as though such policies can never be reversed. They absolutely can; as you
pointed out, incumbents can lose to candidates who promise to repeal the tax.

~~~
Kalium
I don't know how familiar you are with Prop C (the subject here) and
California governance, so please pardon me if I belabor something you already
know in an effort to clarify.

I'm not talking about candidates. We're literally talking about tax policy set
and enacted via plebiscite. Elected officials don't get to tinker with it. As
slow and complex as it is to change policies via representative democracy,
it's _far_ worse when you have to hold another plebiscite to fix glaring
issues. Which has happened more than once in California political history.

That's what's at hand here. Tax policy enacted via a means that elected
politicians don't actually get to work with. The issue you so correctly and
wisely point to is messy enough - just imagine how much worse this particular
Californian mess is.

For all that you're _completely right_ about the apparently insane way tax
policy is treated in American discourse, I think it might be worth considering
that it could be encoded wisdom. Political attention spans tends to be short,
inertia is real, and any policy creates winners who want to preserve it. Never
mind questions of actually being reasonably sure about effects.

With all that in mind, treating tax policy as something you might not get to
reform in a reasonable timeframe might not be the silliest of ideas. There's a
good chance that it might be closer to the truth than expecting a calm,
collected, non-partisan, informed debate aimed at making the policy work as
intended once it's been shown to be in need of improvement.

------
qubax
Not just tech billionaires.

------
kenneth
I'm really not a fan of the entitlement attitude that we should just take
money from the rich to fix our self-inflicted problems.

~~~
ForrestN
I think the question is whether or not "the rich" are part of "we" or not.
Businesses are built using public infrastructure and in some cases (like
Twitter) direct, massively valuable government subsidy. In my opinion, "we"
are asking "each other" to pay more money to solve public problems in
proportion to "our" ability to do so.

~~~
SilasX
Everyone uses public infrastructure. That's what makes it "public
infrastructure". Should we raise your taxes to 80% "because you use the roads
that are built by taxes"?

~~~
ForrestN
No—but we should probably do what we can to make each person and company's tax
burden proportionate to their size and income. And we probably shouldn't frame
efforts to do so as "taking money from the rich" as if wealthy people are
somehow living in a separate community.

~~~
newtothebay
Isn't a flat tax rate already "proportionate to size and income"? What's the
justification for higher tax rate for the rich? I agree that their wealth
depends on public infrastructure, but I'm not sure that their level of
dependence is higher than us.

(I'm asking as a proponent of progressive tax rate, just not for this reason.
So I'd like to clarify)

~~~
ForrestN
I may not have expressed my position clearly. Because most costs of living are
fixed and not proportionate to income, taking 20% of the income of a poor
person will have a disproportionate affect on them, as opposed to someone with
a very high income for whom the difference will only marginally affect their
standard of living. Take 30% of someone's $20,000 income and you will deeply
compromise their ability to exist comfortably in society. Taking 30% of
someone's $5,000,000 income will have no effect on their ability to cover
their needs and live comfortably.

A flat tax, then, is actually quite regressive, rather than neutral.

Speaking in terms of companies, though, there is also a question of proportion
vis a vis size—bigger companies and their employees tend to cost taxpayers
quite a bit more than small businesses. There are no giant Twitter-like
subsidies for five-man firms, for example. Larger firms are much more likely
to make use of legal infrastructure, to need regulation, and to have the power
to seek accommodation by the government for infrastructure needed for their
given business.

------
emcarey
Marc Benioff is one of Paul Ryan's big donors.... maybe he should start paying
taxes with action instead of talking about it in self serving press interviews

~~~
ForrestN
Source? I found an article from 2012 saying that he donated a measly $10,000
before Ryan was fully revealed to most as the craven monster we know him as
today. Not saying you're wrong, just curious to know exact details.

