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Comment by apsec112

2 days ago

San Francisco's budget is around $15 billion, which is larger than that of many states, for a population of around 800,000

800,000 is also larger than the population of several states, and local cost of labor is a lot higher in SF, driving the cost of pretty much everything other than buying commodity goods a government might do higher.

  • 15 billion is more than the respective budgets of Alabama, Oklahoma, New Mexico, North Dakota, Iowa, West Virginia, Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Vermont, New Hampshire, and South Dakota. Of these, only North Dakota, Wyoming, Alaska, and Vermont have populations lower than 800,000.

  • Seattle has roughly the same population as San Francisco and roughly the same labor costs, and has an annual budget of $8.3 billion. At some point you have to just face facts that it's gross mismanagement and incompetence.

    • Seattle is a city, San Francisco is a combined city and county; it literally has a lot of functions that Seattle doesn't. Add a population based pro-rata share of King County’s budget to Seattle’s budget and you get something not all that much less than the budget of the City and County of San Francisco.

      Also, California has realigned a number of what were previously (and are still in other states) state functions to counties, including some felony incarceration that would otherwise be in state prisons, so, even compared to out-of-state city and county combined functions, SF has more it is required to do.

      4 replies →

    • Can you provide some insight into the differences as you see them? And where, just in broad brushstrokes, the mismanagement and incompetence primarily manifests itself? At the high level you cite, assuming those are accurate numbers, my knee jerk is to agree with you, but if you have insight would love to know whether the difference is actually attributable to mismanagement/incompetence/corruption/other bad thing.

      P.s. Your "about" checks out!

    • I think you are probably not comparing apple to apple. I think San Francisco is both a city and a county, while Seattle is a city within a county. Also, the San Francisco International Airport is managed by the city & county of San Francisco, while Seattle Tacoma international airport is managed by Port of Seattle, which is also separate from city of Seattle. The budget if city of San Francisco also includes Municipal Transportation Agency but city of Seattle budget doesn’t include king county metro and sound transit which are separate entity.

    • San Francisco is both a city and a county so the budgets aren’t actually comparable… SF owns the port and the Airport as well. “Facing facts” is great when you actually understand the basic facts before making proclamations.

    • I'm sorry for being unkind, but lazy comments like this really frustrate me. I can't imagine you've done any real research or thinking on this, but still think others have to "face facts" which are coincidentally just exactly whatever you've already decided they are.

      Now, I don't know if San Francisco has a bloated, runaway budget or not – it might! But I do at least know that it's both a city and a county; I expect that San Francisco's budget includes operating the ports and public hospitals – that could be $5bn in spending right there!

      Endless time is wasted by not even doing the most basic thinking before spouting off.

It also has 20x the GDP of Wyoming.

  • GDP is just more people spending more money for more expensive things. It's kind of a failed metric for economic productivity unless you think an $8 Big Mac is twice as productive to the economy than a $4 Big Mac.

    • > GDP is just more people spending more money for more expensive things. It's kind of a failed metric for economic productivity

      It's a good metric for a tax base.

      > unless you think an $8 Big Mac is twice as productive to the economy than a $4 Big Mac

      Which is why we consider both nominal and real GDP. (In your example, the former represents 2x nominal GDP. They're equivalent in terms of real GDP.)

    • > unless you think an $8 Big Mac is twice as productive to the economy than a $4 Big Mac.

      It literally straightforwardly is. It provides the same number of calories, to a worker who is twice as productive in the $8-per-big-Mac city as the $4-per-Big-Mac city. Differences in per-capita productivity between supercities and hinterlands are vast.

What message are you trying to communicate? Are you implying that this is too high? Too low? Poorly spent?