> For one, it includes expenses outside of the municipality.
Exactly. The cherry picked example in the article was chosen to ignore areas with higher expenses.
> For another, corporations are often okay overspending on executive compensation
PG&E had $25 billion revenue last year. How much do you think they spent on lavish executive compensation? Even if you could eliminate $100 million in compensation (doubtful) that’s still less than 0.1% of revenues. People overestimate the impact of executive compensation in large companies by orders of magnitude.
> and other lavish business expenses for tax purposes.
Again, you’re not going to find dramatic savings anywhere in the budget by cutting lavish business expenses at this scale. It’s noise. There’s also a persistent myth that companies can spend their way into saving money via tax write-offs, but for some reason my accountant tells me that’s not how taxes work.
Exactly. The cherry picked example in the article was chosen to ignore areas with higher expenses.
> For another, corporations are often okay overspending on executive compensation
PG&E had $25 billion revenue last year. How much do you think they spent on lavish executive compensation? Even if you could eliminate $100 million in compensation (doubtful) that’s still less than 0.1% of revenues. People overestimate the impact of executive compensation in large companies by orders of magnitude.
> and other lavish business expenses for tax purposes.
Again, you’re not going to find dramatic savings anywhere in the budget by cutting lavish business expenses at this scale. It’s noise. There’s also a persistent myth that companies can spend their way into saving money via tax write-offs, but for some reason my accountant tells me that’s not how taxes work.