Every time I hear the word “job killer” I think of the California Chamber of Commerce, which loves to affix the label to anything that might hurt corporate profits. Most environmental legislation, most pro-labor legislation, most financial regulations, anything that improves employer requriements for health insurance — the Chamber dubs it “job killers.”
And now Ed Lee is using that word to slow down progressive taxes, regulations or business mandates. He’s proposing a Charter Amendment to send any bills that might cause job losses to the Small Business Commission for a “jobs impact” public hearing.
That would give another weapon to downtown interests who want to kill, say, improvements to the Healthy San Francisco law, or any changes in the business tax.
Here’s what kills me: How many jobs were destroyed by the LACK of regulations over the U.S. financial industry? How many jobs were destroyed by a tax system that keeps most of the wealth concentrated in the top one percent? How many jobs were destroyed by cutbacks and layoffs in the public sector (which were a direct result of a failure to seek new revenues that business leaders would have called “job killers”?)
But we don’t have a special commission weighing in on tax cuts and tax breaks that cost the city money and kill city jobs.
Assemblymember Tom Ammiano, who has to deal with the California Chamber and its lackeys, told me that Lee “is talking like a Republican, or like the moderate Democrats in Sacramento.” That’s not where the mayor of San Francisco ought to be.