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Comment by textech | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco is the 16th largest city by population and has a budget of around 14 billion which is like 6 or 7 times larger than many cities with much bigger population. This is just a badly run city and throwing more money at their problems isn't going to help them.

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San Francisco is a combined city and county (the only one in California), so its budget includes things that would be in county budgets for places like Los Angeles and San Jose.

For example, SF MTA is part of the SF budget, but LA MTA is a county agency, and isn't part of the LA city budget.

Seems like a fair comparison to make would be with NYC, whose city government similarly subsumes the counties/boroughs. NYC's per capita budget is about 2/3 of SF's; there may be economies of scale and other non-linear contributors at play with NYC's 10x larger population, or maybe SF is just less efficient.

edit: NYC's MTA is funded separately, including huge state contributions, so this is a terrible comparison. Let this comment be a reminder of the difficulty in comparing municipal budgets.

A fair comparison would be Philadelphia which is a city and county and has an airport.

Their per capita budget is half of SF's.

Even accounting for MTA, SF’s per-capita spending remains much higher than most other US cities. DC is the only other city that is comparable.

Even if you don't account for anything else, the high cost of living here translates to expensive city employees and expensive services. If you account for the "exchange rate" between San Francisco dollars and other city dollars, I wonder how the per capita spending stacks up. I expect it still doesn't look good, but I bet it looks a lot less ridiculous.

It is the city's fault the housing is expensive, which is the reason for the high cost of living.

Maybe if San Francisco did things differently, costs might look like other cities and counties in the Bay Area. Either way, it's going to be much more expensive than your typical city.

> costs might look like other cities and counties in the Bay Area

True, but most likely in a way that also reduced the cost in other cities and counties, because the high cost of SF has pushed people out to lower cost areas in the outskirts. If SF wasn't so expensive, more people from the surrounding area would live there, having the desire if price wasn't the issue, therefore reducing demand and thus costs for the outer areas.

The point has never been to fix problems - it’s to minimize the amount of money rich people have.

Even if the money was burned that would be okay.

It's surprising that you can't conceive of a tax being confiscatory instead of merely being for the paying of something.

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