My cities

Can I pick them or what? I lived for many years in San Francisco, apparently the worst-run city in the US:

It's time to face facts: San Francisco is spectacularly mismanaged and arguably the worst-run big city in America. This year's city budget is an astonishing $6.6 billion — more than twice the budget for the entire state of Idaho — for roughly 800,000 residents. Yet despite that stratospheric amount, San Francisco can't point to progress on many of the social issues it spends liberally to tackle — and no one is made to answer when the city comes up short.

Funny thing about government – they get paid regardless of how good a job they do. Would you hire a housepainter on those terms? An administrative assistant? Yet we do it with government every day. (We can expect government-run medicine to perform similarly.)

Government spending is poverty. It is the destruction of wealth. Imagine a world of hungry people, where the proposed solution is to take food out back and burn it: governments, local and national, apply the same reasoning to money.

Being the social-climber that I am, however, I recently moved to the poorest place in America.

Comments

[Wayne Sherman]

Fascinating stuff. It shows just how well government policies in two of the most liberal cities in the U.S. actually work.

[Bob Knight]

I am a republican too. But your statement is an oxymoron. If you really hate SF so much. Get out of there and come live with us in beautiful SoCal.

[Samira Tamer]

No I think L.A. is more poorly run than SFO. We now have a 10% sales tax and there's talk of increasing it. No talk to limit spending. Spent some quality time with your parents in CT recently.