[mapgrep]

>everyone of those google employees who lives in SF pays SF taxes, quite high taxes as a matter of fact

Not sure what this refers to but San Francisco funds come mainly from payroll tax, sales tax, property tax, and real estate transfer tax.

Payroll tax is levied on companies not people, and even then it's not being levied on the people using these buses as they work down in Mountain View (excepting the small number of SF Googlers who also use the bus, if they do).

Sales tax is going to impact Googlers roughly the same as others in SF. Maybe even less since days are spent in South Bay (if you use the bus and don't work in SF office) and you're likely doing a disproportionate amount of online shopping :)

Property tax is relaively low in San Francisco due to Prop 13, so if you're renting it's not hitting you hard as the property has been held likely for a long time and is held basically steady under prop 13. If you're buying a home in SF you may pay some higher than average property tax but this is held in check by the fact that a 2/3rds popular vote is required for any property tax hike under prop 13. So they're not that bad.

>2-3x more than any of these hippy touchy-feely types who claim that SF is theirs and theirs alone.

Citation needed. This sounds pretty out of wack.

[_dps]

> Payroll tax is levied on companies not people

As a purely practical matter, payroll tax is levied on both sides of the employment transaction in the US [0]. Beyond that, diverse economic research in and out of the US suggests that the bulk of the tax incidence [1] of payroll taxes is on employees [2].

>> 2-3x more than any of these hippy touchy-feely types who claim that SF is theirs and theirs alone.

> Citation needed. This sounds pretty out of wack.

Here's some napkin analysis. [3] claims Google's average salary for a software engineer is 113k, and [4] claims that San Francisco / San Mateo's average salary is 64k. Since the 64k is dragged upward by the Google salaries, let's speculate that the Googlers on average make twice as much as the "touchy-feely" residents. It seems totally reasonable to think that someone making twice as much money will pay twice as much across the suite of payroll tax (they earn more), sales tax (they spend more), property tax (they own more property), and transfer tax (they exchange property more often). One would want to empirically corroborate this, but it doesn't sound unreasonable to me.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payroll_tax#United_States

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence

[2] http://www.nber.org/papers/w5053

[3] http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Salaries-E9079.htm

[4] http://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/on-numbers/scott-thom...

[mapgrep]

You missed that the vast majority of Google's workers, and an even higher percentage of those on the buses, are not paying SF payroll tax because they are not based in SF. (SF payroll tax cannot be levied on an employee in Mountain View, no matter where they live.)

Also, it doesn't make sense that Googlers would pay 2x property tax. Property tax does not scale with salary. You can make a ton of money but if you rent you pay (indirectly) the same property tax as your neighbor and the same as the tenant five years ago paying 1/2 the rent (since the same landlord has held the building the whole time and you can't re-appraise under prop 13).

If you buy, meanwhile, Googlers pay extra only to the extent property values rise. While they have gone up (~25% in a year), we have not seen anything close to a doubling. (And it's not clear that Googlers "own more property" as you suggest. While they tend to be wealthier, they also tend to be younger and more geographically mobile, which would encourage renting.)

As for sales tax, think about where that comes from. It doesn't apply to groceries or rent. We're talking about restaurants, bars, car dealerships, and discretionary retail. We're also talking about a population who can eat dinner and lunch and breakfast at work, and get free haircuts and laundry, who tend to order discretionary retail products online, and who live in SF and take a bus to work. Do we really expect them to spend 2-3x buying cars, patronizing local retail, and going out restaurants, and bars?

I do realize Googlers go out and spend big locally from time to time. My point is that the office perks, use of transit, and use of online retail are going to mitigate their contribution to the local sales tax base. They might still spend more on sales tax-able items than the typical San Franciscan, but 2x-3x?

[dragonwriter]

> You can make a ton of money but if you rent you pay (indirectly) the same property tax as your neighbor and the same as the tenant five years ago paying 1/2 the rent (since the same landlord has held the building the whole time and you can't re-appraise under prop 13).

You seem to be confusing SF rent control with California property tax re-appraisal rules. Prop 13 limits on the increase in tax basis value of property don't affect landlords ability to raise rents.

> If you buy, meanwhile, Googlers pay extra only to the extent property values rise.

And, because of Prop 13, not more than 1% more for that reason per year, unless they buy new property or do something else that allows an unlimited move to full market value.

[mapgrep]

>You seem to be confusing SF rent control with California property tax re-appraisal rules. Prop 13 limits on the increase in tax basis value of property don't affect landlords ability to raise rents.

Not confused on that. My point is that the guy paying 2x rent than his predecessor in the unit — rents can rise freely on vacancy under Costa Hawkins, so rent control doesn't play into this as you point out — is not contributing one extra dime in property tax, since the property tax on the building hasn't changed.

Good point on for-sale property, I didn't realize 13 held down those taxes even at sale.

[dragonwriter]

> Not confused on that. My point is that the guy paying 2x rent than his predecessor in the unit — rents can rise freely on vacancy under Costa Hawkins, so rent control doesn't play into this as you point out — is not contributing one extra dime in property tax, since the property tax on the building hasn't changed.

The property tax will change each year as the assessed value can change year to year (but only, absent a change of ownership, increase no more than 1%/year.) The only time it won't change is if the assessed value doesn't change.