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Comment by jellicle | Hacker News Reader

14,000 full and part-time city employees to run a city of 800,000.

You love the city's services so much that you chose to live there, yet because you are an expert city planner, you are confident that all those services could be provided with fewer staff. Police, Fire, EMS, garbage, roads, parks, public health, water supply. Feel free to check the box next to the services in that list that you think should not be provided, and feel free to relocate to a city that does not in fact provide those services.

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No, I don't love the City's services; I love the people who LIVE in the City. The streets are full of potholes. The public transit system (MUNI) is chronically broken (why? because 70% of their cost is personnel!). There are 9000 City employees who make more than $100K per year; when I have friends who are barely able to get by.

Remember: the Government of SF didn't make this City like some Disneyland and then people moved in; the people were here first . You'd be hard-pressed to find anybody in San Francisco who moved here because "the City's services are great".

the homeless?

OK, you have a point: the homeless do get some benefit from City services. Though even that system is broken. I pass by several homeless people lying in the doorways every day.

It may be possible that there's a disconnect between "I'm offended by seeing street poverty on a daily basis" and "the system for dealing with poverty in SF is broken".

Unless your plan is to turn all homeless people in SF into Soylent Green, in which case you should run for mayor and good luck with that.

You propose to reduce property tax to 1%. Property tax is what pays for schools, it's not some kind of source of government waste as you seem to imply.

You probably don't know this, but this year, schools in SF were shut down for a extra week each year because of lack of funding. That's a week of schooling that my kids were supposed to have and they aren't getting because it's impossible to bring in the correct amount of money to keep our schools open. How would you propose to pay for schools if you slashed property taxes to 1%? (Hint: bake sales only take you so far.)

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