A lot of people are struggling to get by. |
If there is a deep drop in revenues, it is very difficult to accumulate substantial enough reserves to keep spending at the maximum allowed by the cap. |
If you do an amnesty plan every five years, people will hold on to their money rather than pay taxes, because they know they will be able to pay up without penalties. The fact that we had a successful amnesty last year argues that we should wait at least a decade or probably 20 years to have another. |
Over time you should ramp down the program in size. |
People have different ideas of what a loophole is. To bring in a lot of money, it has to affect a large number of people and that amounts to a significant tax increase on those people. |
The bottom-line difficulty is that many low-income folks don't have money to save, even if they desperately want to. |
The longer I look at the measure, the more I think I don't really know what would be happening. |
The program is just too large and isn't reaching the communities, businesses and workers it was created to target. |
The size and scope of the current program undermines its intent. |
There is a wage premium in the Bay Area. The critical question, however, is whether that premium is sufficient to offset the higher cost of living here. |
We can't really say what benefit the state and local areas have gotten from a billion-and-a-half-dollar tax break. |
We're going to put together a corrected list that will run in the newspaper. |
We're looking at something that is one step above a bare-bones budget, |
What's troubling about the economic recovery that we've been in is that all of the traditional indicators of employment, household income and poverty levels are lagging behind prior expansions. |
You could end up in a situation where the fund is up against the cap for several years running and there builds up a large reserve. |