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Comment by jkimmel | Hacker News Reader

>The SF transit situation is the direct consequence of a failing tax base. The wealth of the local tech industry is not "trickling down" to improve city infrastructure, in proportion to the industry's growth.

I'm not sure this is true. The city budget has grown substantially, now ~$9B [1].

The problem is we don't spend it on transit infrastructure, and when we do invest, we get financially mismanaged projects like the central subway [2].

[1] http://modernluxury.com/san-francisco/story/san-franciscos-i... [2] http://www.sfweekly.com/sanfrancisco/covering-their-tracks-t...

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Wow, the San Fransisco budget is around double the entire state budget for Oklahoma. If San Fran can't keep up its infrastructure with about 2x the budget per capita in around .3% of the land area, they're doing it wrong.

Salaries. Low in Oklahoma. High in San Francisco. Come back with the budget number in terms of median employee salary, and we might be able to start to compare the two.

The market more than doubled since 2005. An increase in the city budget from $5.3b to $9b is not that impressive in that context. They would get that if they simply held an unmanaged index fund. You would expect more growth in the bay area and better redistribution of the tax revenue.

Mismanagement of public funds is bad, agreed.

The city budget is a yearly flow of cash. You can't directly compare that to equity markets, when equity pricing is at its simplest the discounted future cash flow for eternity.

Good point. Still, the city budget is in some sense tied to the market. The unemployment rate almost halved since 2010. Per capita income almost doubled since 2000. Apple revenues alone tripled in the last five years. You'd expect the local municipalities to cash in on the taxes.

Cities can't impose local income taxes as it is politically difficult.. Prop 13 means they can't get money from increases in rents, and they don't want to build more anyway. As a result cities don't see the gains from booms in the way they would in other regions of the country.

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