The City Council yesterday voted unanimously to put their controversial “progressive business tax” on the November ballot.
If voters approve, which seems likely, the measure will raise taxes by as much as 760% on Oakland’s biggest employers, including Kaiser Permanente, Sutter Health, Southwest Airlines, Clorox and UPS. If you think that you, the consumer, aren’t going to be paying a lot more for your healthcare, your airline ticket or that next bottle of bleach, you’re living in the same fantasy world as Carroll Fife, who co-sponsored the tax hike. And all this is happening at a time of rampant inflation, the worst in decades, which is hitting poor people and people of color especially hard.
Fife and her fellow Council members claim that the $22 million raised by the new business tax will “strengthen critical city services to address homeless and keep our streets clean and safe.” They also claim that the measure will protect small businesses, which they say will actually see a tax cut. What they don’t tell you is that the average small business will save about $60 a year—hardly the glittering tax cut the Council is touting.
We’re just coming out (we hope!) of the two-year COVID shutdown, which was so costly to businesses small and large. Companies are struggling to recover; is this really the time to impose higher taxes on Oakland’s biggest job creators? As the Oakland Chamber of Commerce informs us, the new tax “will destabilize larger employers’ ability to stay local, reduce Oakland’s workforce and, as a result, further reduce support of our small businesses and retailers.”
Just what we need: more companies leaving town, and laying off workers, so that the City Council can have even more money to spend on progressive solutions to homelessness. Consider this: the Chamber of Commerce says “the city’s own economists have determined that the proposed tax increases will result in 2,300 jobs lost in Oakland.” Our city had already lost more than one-third of its businesses by last February compared to February, 2021, and that’s just the beginning. Fife & Co. are determined to drive even more businesses out of town, so they can hire more violence interrupters.
People often ask me what I mean by calling someone a “progressive.” The word has many meanings, but a primary feature of progressives is their desire to raise taxes however they can, whenever they can, on whomever they can, in order to fund dubious schemes. Look around you, not only at Oakland but at San Francisco too. Both cities are throwing more money at homelessness than ever before in history (San Francisco’s annual homelessness budget is now $1.1 billion). And yet the problems of homelessness, including the crime it fosters and the deterioration of our quality of life, are worse than ever. You would think that the powers-that-be would realize that what they’ve been doing isn’t working. But you’d be wrong: for Fife, Bas, Thao, Kaplan & Co., if you do something stupid, then double down and do it again.
Please vote NO in November on this dumb, dangerous tax hike!
Steve Heimoff