Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Big Tech Backs London Breed for San Francisco Mayor in Today's Vote

London Breed
A special election takes place today in San Francisco for the mayor's slot, to fill the vacancy left by the sudden death of Ed Lee last December. The winner of the election will serve out the balance of the late Lee's term which ends in Jan. 2020.

There are 8 candidates on the ballot but for all practical purposes it is a three-way race between  London Breed, current president of the board of supervisors and a native San Franciscan raised in public housing by her grandmother; Jane Kim, a supervisor who’s lived in the city for years after growing up in New York; and Mark Leno, a gay former state senator.

All three, surprise, surprise have put
the housing crisis and homelessness as the top city problems that they will "solve." But to show you the true state of affairs on the streets of San Francisco, two of the three, Breed and Leno, list broken car windows as a problem they will "solve." There are 85 car break-ins per day in the People's Republic.

All three are wacky interventionists but Kim is probably the worst. She is a seriously wires crossed lefty. She wants to double the number of publicly available sidewalk eye-sore toilets. She also says she wants to hire the homeless to clean the sidewalks. (That is quite the plan, the homeless in San Francisco can barely stand). She wants developers to pay "their fair share" for transit, parks, schools, affordable housing and "other services." She also says the city has to show the country "how to stop Donald Trump."

She had Bernie Sanders’s endorsement in her failed bid for state senate in 2016.

Leno has the endorsements of much of the city's unions. As part of his micromanaging plan for the city, he says he would push for "hire locally" legislation. I am sure he doesn't realize it but this is a Trump-lite neanderthal-style thinking that flies in the face of comparative advantage.

According to the LA Times, during his time as both a California assemblyman and senator, Leno authored 161 laws, including many that were "groundbreaking," LGBT friendly and pro-tenant.

Breed gives some lip service to public "affordable housing" but it doesn't appear to be where her focus is. And a very good sign, she doesn't offer much in the way of across-the-board microplanning in contrast to Kim and Leno.

Most interesting, she has the backing of Big Tech.  Billionaire investor Ron Conway, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, former Yahoo chief Marissa Mayer, and Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire entrepreneur and philanthropist and widow of Steve Jobs, all support her.

This probably means she talks even less in terms of wacko lefty stuff behind the scenes.

A further indication of this is that the pro-building group  YIMBY (Yes in My Backyard) supports her.

In any other city, Breed would be the lefty on the ballot. Here in the People's Republic of San Francisco, she looks like the second coming of Milton Friedman.

-RW  

UPDATE

UPDATE 2

Eight days after the election, in a nail-biter, it's clear that London Breed will be the next mayor of San Francisco:
Mark Leno held a slim lead in the ranked-choice balloting after election night last week, but Breed soon pulled ahead and steadily widened the gap. On Wednesday she had a 2,177-vote advantage over Leno with about 6,690 ballots still to be counted, according to the city Department of Elections.

4 comments:

  1. Not being familiar with San Francisco politics , a quick glance at the headline and the picture, I thought "She's from England?' and "Holy Cow, Wenzel's gone full racist!!"

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  2. "...two of the three, Breed and Leno, list broken car windows as a problem they will "solve." There are 85 car break-ins per day in the People's Republic."

    Terrific, someone's finally going to take on the broken window fallacy...

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  3. "She also says she wants to hire the homeless to clean the sidewalks. "

    That's (literally) like paying your kid to make his own bed, ain't it?

    ReplyDelete