How many people does it take to run a city?

[Mick1]

Here are the current number of adults residing in American and Californian cities, along with the number who are members of the municipal workforce, thereby answering the question “How many people does it take to run a city?

If you’d asked me how many municipal employees San Francisco had before I read this article, I would have said 10,000 to 14,000. Ah, no. The answer is 34,800, I kid you not.

Daniel Lurie’s SF budget plan is already meeting resistance – and it’s not even out yet

That is just an extraordinary number of municipal employees, nearly 5% of all adults in San Francisco work for the city of SF. That’s 3x to 5x (except for worker’s paradise NYC, and junior varsity worker’s paradise Seattle) more than any of these other cities, none of which are known for their restraint in hiring employees:

San Francisco	715,000	34,800	4.87%
New York	6,765,500	292,483	4.32%
Seattle	673,200	13,700	2.04%
Chicago	2,193,400	36,063	1.64%
Los Angeles	3,134,000	50,000	1.60%
Portland	532,100	7,284	1.37%
Sacramento	420,600	5,000	1.19%
San Diego	1,146,000	13,100	1.14%
San Jose	792,900	7,000	0.88%

I am absurdly proud of the fact that San Jose has the smallest percentage. We’re basically the same size as SF (about 12% larger) with 1/5th the municipal workers.

Audaces fortuna iuvat

[Beeg_Dawg]

Amazing how the beast grows.

Washington is hiring 300 accountants to enforce it’s new millionaire tax, although its implementation is two years away.  I get the sense they will retain their jobs even if the tax is found to violate the  state constitution and is tossed.

[Mick1]

I tried to do a comparison of IRS auditors hired (or let go) by each President. Party doesn’t seem to matter much. Here they are ranked by addition and subtraction over the course of each President’s term since WWII:

President	Net change in IRS revenue agents
George W. Bush	123
John F. Kennedy	1,859
Joe Biden	2,502
Dwight Eisenhower	2,966
Ronald Reagan	3,742
George H. W. Bush	−1,429
Donald Trump (1st term)	−2,010
Barack Obama	−2,707
Bill Clinton	−3,066

 

Interesting that the two largest auditor increases came under Republicans and the two largest net decreases in auditors came under Democrats. I knew that Clinton had a significant Federal employee reduction program.

Couldn’t get reliable data on Truman, Johnson, Nixon, Ford or Carter.

• This reply was modified 4 days, 15 hours ago by Mick1.
• This reply was modified 4 days, 15 hours ago by Mick1.

Audaces fortuna iuvat

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