Authored by Brian Back via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

Facing mounting budget woes this election year, as spending far outpaces revenues, the City of San Francisco is scrambling to reform its infamously large and complex tax burden on business.

San Francisco’s five largest employers now account for nearly a quarter of the city’s total business tax revenue, according to an April 14 report in the San Francisco Examiner. If any were to relocate outside of the city, such would leave San Francisco—currently facing an $800 million budget deficit—vulnerable.

As such, Mayor London Breed and city officials are currently negotiating with business and labor leaders to devise tax reform measures for the November ballot that could simplify its tax code and even out the load on top businesses, the San Francisco Examiner reported.

In particular, city officials say they would like to see changes that would not incentivize businesses to move jobs out of San Francisco, since the city’s largest employers are required to pay a disproportionate amount of business taxes.

But shifting the tax burden elsewhere, such as increasing the city’s already large sales tax, could hurt a retail sector that has been decimated by a flurry of closures in recent years, analysts say.

City Controller Greg Wagner has said the complexity and number of new taxes passed by voters in recent years combined with a poor economy have increased tax disputes between the city and large businesses, according to Alyssa Sewlal, a spokesperson for his office.

Such disputes include a legal demand from General Motors for more than $121 million in tax refunds, as well as tens of millions of dollars in refund claims, and settlements and lawsuits on behalf of companies who say they were overtaxed such as Deloitte, Gap, WeWork, AppLovin, Chime Financial, and Block—formerly Square—since 2020, according to the San Francisco Examiner.

At the same time, the mayor’s office has been trying to direct more attention toward helping tourist-reliant businesses including hotels, restaurants, and arts and entertainment groups, including launching new small business grants and laying out plans to revitalize its downtown. Several such businesses have denounced the city’s street conditions, crime, costly permitting, and escalated taxes.

Factors such as a struggling office market aided by the rise of remote work, retail and commercial vacancies, poor recovery from the pandemic, and lagging tourism have played a role in revenues not keeping up with city spending that has increased significantly over the past decade.

Currently at $14.6 billion, San Francisco’s budget rivals most major U.S. cities. Because it is forecast to escalate by more than $1 billion over the next five years, the city will be on track to post a deficit surpassing $1 billion by 2027 barring major changes, the San Francisco Examiner reported.

City employee salaries, pension benefits, and health care costs are projected to increase by about $500 million within the upcoming four fiscal years, according to Ms. Breed’s office.

The mayor, who is up for re-election in November, told city departments in December they will be required to cut their budgets by about 10 percent in the upcoming fiscal year, and that they must also consider an additional 5 percent in cuts as a “contingency reduction.”

The city’s next budget, which goes into effect July 1, is scheduled to go before the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a vote June 1.

By Sam Bourgi of CreditNews,

Housing is becoming an exclusively upper-class privilege in a growing number of cities.

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is refusing to release additional information about an agreement it reached over a COVID-19 vaccine that has earned it at least $400 million.

The NIH declined to provide any materials in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Epoch Times.

“The NIH withholds the entirety of the records as they are protected from release,” Gorka Garcia-Malene, an NIH officer, told The Epoch Times in a letter.

She cited an exemption outlined in the act that allows government agencies to partially or fully withhold information.

“In this case, exemption 3 incorporates 35 U.S.C. 209 (f), which reads in relevant part, ‘No Federal agency shall grant any license under a patent or patent application on a federally owned invention unless the person requesting the license has supplied the agency with a plan for development or marketing of the invention, except that any such plan shall be treated by the Federal agency as commercial and financial information obtained from a person and privileged and confidential and not subject to disclosure under section 552 of title 5,’” Ms. Garcia-Malene wrote.

“Exemption 4 protects from disclosure trade secrets and commercial or financial information that is privileged and confidential,” she added.

In February 2023, Moderna announced that it had paid $400 million to the NIH and would make additional payments in the future as part of a licensing agreement for spike proteins used in the company’s COVID-19 vaccine. The Epoch Times obtained a copy of the contract, which confirmed the payment but redacted details of the future payments.

The Epoch Times then lodged a new request, seeking more details about the future payments, which are said to be based on how many COVID-19 vaccines are sold.

Ms. Garcia-Malene was responding to the new request.

James Love, director of the nonprofit Knowledge Ecology International, said the information should be made public.

“The NIH put out several press statements about the royalty dispute with Moderna, and they should not now claim it is some secret confidential information. And when hundreds of millions of dollars are at stake, the public interest in transparency is large too,” Mr. Love told The Epoch Times in an email.

“There are a lot of NIH officials who resent transparency,” he added.

Inquiries to NIH spokespersons received away messages. Another request for comment, sent to one of the addresses provided in the away messages, was not returned.

The Epoch Times plans to appeal the NIH’s decision.

The NIH is one of several government agencies that receive royalty payments. Officials there have fought against attempts to acquire information on these payments, but in 2023, they disclosed some $325 million in royalties received between 2009 and 2020 after being sued.

Some experts say the payments, made to the agency and many of its top scientists, should be stopped.

“Neither the government nor any government employee should have any financial interest in a product for which the government has any involvement in licensing or promoting,“ Aaron Siri, managing partner of Siri & Glimstad LLP, told The Epoch Times in an email. ”It creates a dangerous conflict of interest.”

Move on BioNTech

The NIH is trying to obtain more money from COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers, according to recent filings.

BioNTech, Pfizer’s partner, said in the forms that the NIH served it with a notice of default because the NIH’s position is that BioNTech owes it money from COVID-19 vaccine sales.

BioNTech said it does not think it owes the NIH money but that “the ultimate outcome of these matters is uncertain and we cannot guarantee that our interpretation of these license agreements will prevail, or that we will not ultimately need to pay some or all of the royalty and other related amounts in dispute.”

The NIH did not return inquiries on the BioNTech filings.

The NIH has said previously it licensed its spike protein technology to BioNTech for the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.

The Epoch Times has submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for the notice of default and related documents. Another request seeks information on whether the NIH has threatened or served Pfizer with a similar notice.

However much money the U.S. government receives in royalties will be much less than it has paid for the vaccines. The government has purchased hundreds of millions of shots, spending north of $30 billion.