S.F.'s top-paid employee made $840K. Here's what every city worker gets paid

I think there’s valuable outrage to parse through and confirm in this headline. So, given the context of SF prices:

Estimated cost of living for a 2+2 atomic family in SF is $68,000 a year excluding housing.

Median annual mortgage payment in SF is $120,000 a year.

Taxes for the title salary of $840k above assuming an atomic family are 37% federal and 11% state; so:

Taxes on that salary are $405,000 a year.

So, the highest paid city employee of SF , if they try to buy a home and raise an atomic family in it, will have $250,000 of spending money after all expenses, assuming a single-income household with the employee’s partner handling home and child duties while they’re working.

(If they hire an au pair to care for the children so that both parents can work, then it about breaks even; the cost of the au pair is paid by the second salary, and so I didn’t include it here.)

I am not arguing that they deserve to be paid to life the American atomic 2+2 dream, I’m just using that as my cost basis here as a litmus test to calibrate my outrage.

Duly calibrated: even under excessive but still plausible family circumstances, this wage feels too high. For a city that’s busy failing like San Francisco, issuing a quarter million dollars of spending money to a worker does indeed seem excessive to me.