$14.6 BILLION dollars a year? Honestly, that sounds like a lot.
Dividing that number by the number of residents and you get roughly $18,000 per citizen. Per year.
Compare that to what other American cities spend per citizen, and the comparison is – uh, well, I dunno – astounding? Amazing? Impressive? Ridiculous?
Recently I did a quick bit of research and a little bit of arithmetic and came up with this table. It illustrates what I would say is an absolutely absurd situation wherein we say that we can’t afford to hire more police officers or provide more support to the homeless yet our spending per citizen is many multiples of what comparably sized cities are spending.
Where is all that money going?
Below is a list of some items under this topic. I’ll dig down into each of them in subsequent posts.
- For our current elected leaders, is spending directed at non-profits organizations a back-door way to secure campaign contributions from their management and boards of directors?
- Yes, I would agree that “things” are more expensive in San Francisco than other cities. But come on – DOUBLE what things cost in Seattle? TRIPLE what things cost in Denver?
- City elected leaders are comfortable spending $70,000 of taxpayer money visiting schools in Japan. After all, what’s $70,000 in an ocean that’s $14,600,000,000 large? Who’s gonna miss 0.00048% of the city budget? Who’s gonna even notice? *
* Thanks to the SF Standard for sleuthing that one out.