Here's a novel concept for San Francisco: when the budget picture improves, maybe don't keep squeezing the businesses that stuck around through the worst of it.

The city's fiscal outlook is brightening, and Mayor Lurie is making a push to cut the overgrown business tax burden that was layered on during the pandemic recovery era. It's a move that deserves more than polite applause — it deserves urgency.

Let's be clear about what happened. During COVID and its aftermath, San Francisco piled on taxes and fees in a desperate bid to keep the municipal machine humming while storefronts went dark and office towers emptied out. The result? A city that became even more expensive to operate in, right when businesses needed relief the most. Thousands left. Many aren't coming back.

Now that revenues are trending upward — thanks in part to a slowly recovering downtown and some surprisingly resilient sectors — the rational move is to start unwinding the tax burden that made SF less competitive than virtually every other major metro in the country.

But this is San Francisco, where "rational" and "fiscal policy" rarely share a sentence. Expect resistance from the usual corners of City Hall, where every dollar of tax revenue is treated as a sacred entitlement rather than what it actually is: money taken from people who earn it.

The mayor's instinct here is correct. Lower business taxes aren't a giveaway to the rich — they're a signal to every entrepreneur, restaurateur, and startup founder weighing whether San Francisco is worth the hassle. Right now, for too many of them, the answer is no.

A healthier budget should mean the city can afford to ease up, not that it's found new ways to spend. Tax cuts during good times build the foundation for resilience during bad ones. That's not ideology — it's math.

The question isn't whether SF can afford to cut taxes. It's whether the Board of Supervisors will let it happen, or whether they'll find a way to spend every last dime before businesses see a cent of relief.

We're watching. So is every business with a moving truck on speed dial.