On paper, it sounds almost elegant. Why slash programs when you can just ask billionaires to chip in a little more? But here in reality — specifically, in a city that has spent the last five years watching tech companies and high-income earners flee to Miami, Austin, and even Sacramento — the math gets a lot shakier.

Let's be clear about the problem: San Francisco has a spending problem, not a revenue problem. The city's budget has ballooned past $14 billion — yes, billion with a B — for a city of roughly 800,000 people. That's more per capita than most small nations. And yet somehow we're told the cupboard is bare and services are on the chopping block.

A local wealth tax would make San Francisco one of the only cities in the country to attempt such a thing, and for good reason — it's almost certainly going to accelerate the exact exodus that's already shrinking the tax base. Wealthy residents aren't tethered to a ZIP code. They have options. And every time we tell them they're the ATM for a government that can't prioritize, more of them exercise those options.

The real question nobody at City Hall wants to answer: where is the $14 billion going? Before we squeeze more out of residents who already pay some of the highest state and local taxes in the nation, maybe we should audit the extraordinary spending we're already doing. How about fewer six-figure salaries for middle managers in redundant departments? How about actual accountability for the billions spent on homelessness with little measurable improvement?

Taxing your way out of a spending crisis is like bailing water without patching the hole in the boat. San Francisco doesn't need new revenue streams — it needs a government that respects the revenue it already has.