One of the most interesting civic conversations about the future of our cities is happening right here in the Bay Area, where San Francisco and Oakland are taking very different approaches to the urgent need for capital investment.
In San Francisco, Mayor Lurie is famously turning to his financial peers to contribute money to the city. In Oakland, Barbara Lee and her Democratic Socialist comrades are resorting to their usual tactic—tax increases—for money. The two approaches couldn’t be different.
Lurie, who portrays himself as a moderate Democrat, is under fire from the leftwing activists in his party for selling out to billionaires. They accuse him of favoring the interests of billionaires over those of working people. I see no evidence of this; Lurie is simply going where the money is. And it is not with working people anymore, who are stretched to the limit by inflation and taxes. Here in Oakland, Barbara Lee and her merry band of taxers, unfortunately, still believe they can endlessly tax the people, even when all the evidence suggests that the people themselves refuse to be taxed further. (See, for instance, the shocking results of Measure E.)
We shouldn’t let Measure E’s defeat—encouraging as that was—blind us to the fact that this mayor and this City Council continue to believe in high taxes for the people. They will never stop trying to squeeze us for every nickel and dime to fund their insane “anti-violence” and “racial equity” schemes. They may be laying low for the time being, but trust me, they’re already plotting out the next round of taxes, whether they be sales, parcel taxes, real estate transfer taxes or whatever. In secret sessions with SEIU and other radical leftists, they’re testing out which new taxes are likely to encounter the least resistance, and union money is paying for focus groups to figure out how we, the public, will react to new tax proposals. There will already be at least two taxing measures on the November ballot: the regional sales tax to fund transit, and a foreclosure property transfer tax. This is on top of the vacant property tax the Council will consider in September, and Council Member Wang has expressed interest in a new utility tax to be impose on residents. So we have to consider the City Council an active, ongoing threat to our fiscal health.
Could Lee follow Lurie’s example and tap into local wealth? Probably not. Lurie has lots of rich friends. Lee does not. She’s spent her career serving one master only: organized labor. Lee is not particularly liked by local Oakland power brokers, and none of them feels personally indebted to her. So San Francisco’s approach is a non-starter for us. All we can reasonably expect is to keep Lee and the Council on a short leash and let them know that the defeat of Measure E was a warning. So were the recalls of Sheng Thao and Pamela Price. We voters tend to allow the leftists to get away with whatever nonsense they please, but we may be in the terminal stage of that game. Which leaves taxes as the only viable way for Lee and her Democratic Socialists to raise money. If that scheme dries up, so do Lee and her City Council.
San Francisco seems poised to break out of its post-COVID lethargy and again become a vibrant, creative and rich city. Oakland on the other hand remains mired in the outhouse of progressive politics, which is to say, taxing the people ever more highly and then handing the money over to the unions. It’s impossible to think of a more corrupt, dysfunctional system than the one currently prevailing in Oakland, but if there is something more sinister out there, it’s lurking in the brains of Wang, Ramachandran, Gallo and other Council Members who do not respect the hard work of Oaklanders who struggle with their everyday bills. They see their job, not as serving the people, but as caterers to the unions, with all the bootlicking that entails. If we, the people, can accomplish one thing in the near future, it would be the demolition of unions like SEIU. They’ve wreaked too much damage on us, and while it’s hard to envision crippling their power, that is the number one goal every sane Oaklander should have in every election.
Steve Heimoff