The latest front in the city's war on corporate math is the CEO pay ratio tax, which penalizes companies where executive compensation dwarfs what the average worker takes home. And the numbers are, admittedly, eye-popping. Gap Inc., headquartered right here in the city, reportedly sports a CEO-to-worker pay ratio of roughly 1,690-to-1. Other major firms pushing back against the tax aren't far behind.

Let's hold two things in our heads at once here.

First: a 1,690-to-1 pay ratio is genuinely staggering. That means Gap's CEO would earn in a single workday what an average employee earns in nearly five years. You don't have to be a socialist to find that a little hard to defend at the company holiday party.

Second — and this is where San Francisco keeps tripping over itself — taxing pay ratios is a blunt instrument that creates perverse incentives. Companies can "fix" their ratio by outsourcing low-wage jobs to contractors, moving headquarters, or simply restructuring on paper. The workers this tax is supposedly designed to help? They don't see a dime more. The city just gets another revenue stream to pour into its $14 billion budget — a budget that somehow still can't keep the streets clean or the shelters functional.

If the Board of Supervisors actually wanted to help low-wage workers, they'd focus on reducing the cost of living that makes a San Francisco paycheck evaporate before rent is paid. Housing reform. Permit streamlining. Cutting red tape for small businesses that actually employ locals.

But that's hard, boring, structural work. A CEO tax? That's a press release. It lets politicians signal moral outrage while the fundamental problems — housing costs, regulatory burden, a shrinking tax base — continue to rot underneath.

Gap's pay ratio is a legitimate conversation worth having. But San Francisco's instinct to tax first and think later isn't the answer. It's the reason companies keep leaving — and taking those jobs, at every pay level, with them.