There are other ways to tax: 1. property tax. In a overheated speculative real estate market like the Bay Area, the inflated values of homes means that even at 1.2 something %, it’s 10-15% of income(a million dollar home is about 12-14k in property tax which is a significant chunk of net income)

2. Sales tax: on all consumption.

3. Gas tax, utilities surcharge. Special taxes, parcel taxes etc

4. Hideous thing we have now that is toll charges. I guess it’s like a congestion charge. Which essentially means that if people have to come into Silicon Valley to work, they have to pay the toll trolls under the bridges, as it were..

It’s one thing for google employees to pay this, but imagine lower income and minimum wage labour folks shelling out money. This means that it’s effectively discrimination against jobs and businesses that can’t hire employees to pay them a liveable wage.

Often the companies are blamed, but is it really them or is it the tax hungry govt? It seems like a good distraction and make scapegoats out of workers in well paid sectors. It’s almost as if companies like google and the rest of FAANG have a complicit cozy arrangement with the govt. the more they hire, the more ka-Ching for the tax collectors.

In fact, my rule of thumb when someone is paraded as a villain..be it google or tech bros or seniors or prop 13..or anyone else, I always follow the money. More often than not, all roads lead to Sacramento. And there are a few scapegoats up front and they are mere distractions.

How can the govt bloat and red tape and inefficiencies be blamed on tech/white colour working class who pay most of the states taxes? How is it possible that public schools don’t have swimming pools and adequate funds for programs when the millions of dollars in property taxes goes to the common state budget pot to be redistributed. Modesto schools are awesome even though they don’t nearly contribute as much as they receive and don’t have the density of Bay Area cities..and yet, high earning areas are blamed for creating inequalities. It’s just odd. If you just follow the money, it’s all pretty clear that all the usual suspects just happen to be convenient scapegoats.

5. Lack of good public transport means car, insurance, gas, registration, repairs etc. it adds up.

6. Then insurance which is actually part of your salary and because we don’t have universal health care, it’s technically wages every month.

Not to mention the latest head tax in Mountain View with most of it paid by google.

One of my neighbors ..to the contempt and disdain of other non techie folks/retirees..proclaimed that after both the adults earning close to half a million, they barely live pay check to pay check with very little savings after buying a new home with their two kids in public school. Remarkable but that’s almost believable if they were leading a comfortable no scarcity life.

You can be on welfare at 45k in Oakland with 7 kids and 2 adults when you are poor and you have services and food stamps and welfare and subsidized housing. There is no where to go below. But when you are upper middle class and you have to pay for everything and what you work for is to maintain a standard of life, then 20k/month isn’t enough for a family of 4.

Most tech employees are on the receiving end of scorn and contempt and envy in the Bay Area. Sometimes even within their own places of employment by transplants from east coast who have California COLA sticker shock or young people just out of school who don’t have families. There is a lot of derision here when one is ambitious and wants to be upward mobile. It’s really strange to me as someone witnessing all this Silicon Valley upheaval as an outsider.

This isn’t my circus as I am not working in SV but it’s really odd. I don’t know what to make of it or see the sense in it. I want to believe that everyone is justified in how they feel from their perspective, but it’s hard to understand how some feel like the most productive class in SV should be the most taxed and exploited. The beauty or tragedy of it is that a large majority of their own believe that the tech working class is undeserving of their status and needs to be taxed more. Not my monkeys, not my circus..but still..its like bizarro world. Only in California. Fascinating.