No. This is not reasonable, especially in light of the fact that the "[...] budget has ballooned by 84% over a period of seven years". Cut the county spending. Just like everyone else has cut their own spending.

A bit hypocritical for Joe Simitian and Mike Wasserman to oppose the County Sales Tax. "Both worried that the county already has a high tax rate, and a sales tax measure would be regressive and disproportionately affect residents who can least afford it." ...yet both had no problem endorsing an equally regressive sales tax for Caltrain ....minutes before.

I totally agree with my County Supervisor and others who "worry about" the regressive nature of general sales taxes (and same-per-property-size 'parcel taxes'). I especially agree with elected officials who VOTE NO on this type of revenue, rather than 'just talk'. If you don't walk the walk, 'talking the talk' just don't matter!

THANKS JOE!

[now - a county wide general sales tax on real estate - a Transfer Tax - based on a very small percentage of the Sale Price. That is a form of Sales Tax that hits wealth, and that I could support]

As a business trained person, I find "sales" taxes to be the worst approach because all that does is encourages the wealthy to shop for the places with the lowest sales taxes and make purchases there.

Or what really does happen is that large purchases are done out of the country and brought here. Since there is no way to enforce taxes on that action.

I wish we would simply have a transaction tax on all money transactions. This includes buying and selling stocks, bonds, in kind product sharing. Like whether a landlord shares ownership with a third party service provider like Zeus Living or AirBnB.

If this were done at say 10% and a person bought $100,000 worth of stock than $10,000 would be collected and the point of investment. Granted, this would "depress" stock prices, but many investors would likely be a lot more careful in investing anyway because they pay up front the cost of the purchases. It may "slow" down transactions as well, but that is not necessarily bad given people with think more carefully on their investments too.

There is an argument that acting too fast is the largest risk to markets, involving speculation. Speculation is simply gambling in another word. And a lot of business today involves gambling with other peoples money. This is called leverage. Leverage is debt. Which means people are gambling with money they don't even have. This was fine until the crisis of COVID.

COVID is disrupted so much that the debt is collapsing all businesses that are not able to be called "essential" as long as COVID reigns over us. The financial sector is developing such a toxic level of credit regarding all kinds especially business, similar to the housing crisis, that it will see this house of cards come down.

The only way out of this is to accept the permanent loss of values, in effect right off the toxic debt. And we cannot try the same solution as 2007 because it was in actuality a failure. We never recovered the values, jobs, or earnings up to the level we should have been without the crisis that was made by the people involved in the Great Recession.