Squeeze the Charmin-tm don’t squeeze budgets for community services

The local rag reports that leadership is considering capping the business tax to less that $1m per account and said that in the example of VMWare, the tax proposal, linked to their commercial lease or their real estate asset and footprint, would be therefore lowered by the formula from a proposed $1,700,000 to $1,000,000 or a rebate of 70 percent. 

Why would we do that?

Did VMware itself request this?

I just looked it up:

VMVare has a market cap of $43 billion with a B. It has 37,000 employees world wide. It was founded in 1998 — I moved here in 1974, for comparison. It’s CEO  Rangarajan Raghuram made $13,985,782 in total compensation as Director and Chief Executive Officer at VMware Inc in 2021. $1,439,855 was received as Total Cash, $12,545,927 was received as Equity — i.e. tied to their financials. 

It’s earnings are in excess of $3 Billon for the first quarter of 2022 — VMware likely flushes more than a million dollar in toilet paper into our sewers each year. They could likely afford closer to $50m here in taxes. 

The article reports that the overall tax is targeted to bring in $16m per year.

Beyond unicorns, there are close to 100 companies here valued at between a billion dollars and close to a trillion dollars (remember: a trillion dollars is 1000x a billion dollars): Amazon, trading at $1.2T as of yesterday, and Tesla, trading at $900B. Taxing them based on their financials might yield combined more than $100m to the coffers. 

I believe that a tax pegged to a nexus of the business community’s wealth and abundance would bring in closer to $100m. I believe that what we are doing, instead, is gifting the business community another $80m in writing such a flaccid new ordinance. 

Why are we doing that?

The report lists five companies who would pay the maximum $1m. 

It ignores Ribbit Capital who raised $1.1 Billion: I think we should enact a $1 per Thousand tax, and raise $1m for the coffers on every billion in venture capital transacted here yearly. 

Palo Alto is likely the greatest concentration of wealth in the known universe —so why are our libraries only open the equivalent of three days per week and the community centers only open during the 9 to 5? To me that is a more fundamental measure of something being wrong than our perceived role in fixing the housing crisis. (as Eric Filseth pointed out somewhere in writing: that problem is a trillion dollar problem that only business per se can solve) 

Let’s look at the 100 wealthiest companies here and figure out, based on market cap, payroll and earnings how to fairly assess $100m or AN AVERAGE OF $1M APIECE, our share. 

A million dollars should be the average assessment not the highest assessment. 

Mark Weiss

in Palo Alto but not a billionaire

ps 

Here is a list of 16 unicorns in Palo Alto and their funding totals: as of March, 2022)

TripActions: $7.2B/$1040M (i.e. they are worth seven billion and they have raised a billion)

Gong: $7.2B/$583M

SambaNova: $5B/$1132M

Rubrik: $4B/$553M

Houzz: $4B/$1102M Next Insurance: $4B/$881M

PsiQuantum: $3.1B/$728M

Plume: $2.6B/$713M

UniPhore: $2.5B/$445M

Medable: $2.1B/$534M

Salt Security: $1.4/$271M

Flipboard: $1.3/$210M

Turing: $1.1B/$136M

Minio: $1.0/$126M

Noname Security: $1.0B/$141M

Snorkel AI: $1.0B/$196M

Unicorns alone account for roughly 50 billion in corporate assessment and about 10 billion in recent vc transactions that our current proposal excludes from calculation. They’d more likely brag of rebutting $10m to expand librariry hours than, as mayor Burt claims, use this as an excuse to decamp to Milpitas or Lubbock.