SEIU California has pulled its endorsement of State Senator Scott Wiener in his congressional race, and the reason tells you everything you need to know about how Sacramento's labor-left coalition operates.

The sin? Wiener opposed an "overpaid CEO tax" — a gross receipts surcharge on companies where executive compensation exceeds a certain ratio of their lowest-paid workers' wages. Sounds righteous on a picket sign. Falls apart under about three minutes of scrutiny.

Here's the problem: the companies this tax would actually hit aren't the tech behemoths SEIU loves to villainize. The biggest firms — your Apples and Googles — pay their lowest-tier employees well enough that the CEO-to-worker ratio often wouldn't trigger the tax at all. Instead, it lands on companies with large numbers of genuinely lower-wage workers. Restaurants. Retailers. The exact businesses employing the people SEIU claims to champion.

As one SF resident put it bluntly: "If you look at the ratios of these top companies, they would be exempt from the tax. It would hit companies that have lower wage employees. Again, SF coming in hot with ineffective policy that sounds good but doesn't accomplish much."

Another local didn't mince words either: "Stop the poorly conceived taxes. You're just incentivizing CEOs to replace lower paid workers with robots or offshoring. Make the income tax more progressive if you want to tax the rich."

This is a pattern we've seen over and over in California politics: a union or advocacy group floats a policy that polls well in focus groups but creates perverse incentives in the real economy. Anyone who objects gets branded as insufficiently progressive and cast out. One Bay Area resident nailed the dynamic perfectly: "Another day of the sun rising, another day of leftist purity testing."

Look, we're not here to carry water for Scott Wiener — the man has plenty of policy positions we'd take issue with. But when a politician actually does the wonkish work of evaluating whether a tax will accomplish its stated goals and concludes it won't, punishing him for that is how you get a legislature full of people who vote based on vibes instead of outcomes.

SEIU didn't pull this endorsement because Wiener is wrong on the policy. They pulled it because he refused to play along. And that distinction matters.