Dori: Seattle’s budget per capita massively higher than other U.S. cities

Jenny Durkan’s proposed new budget for 2020 is “free everything.” Free college, free transit. It’s all free in Seattle.

Of course, “free” doesn’t actually mean “free.” What it means is, “We’re going to allow a bunch of deadbeats to have their lives paid for by other people.”

A listener pointed me toward the budgets of other major cities around the U.S. So, I began crunching some numbers. What I found is really astonishing.

Houston has more than triple our population — yet its budget is 25 percent less than Seattle’s. Boston’s budget is about half of ours, even though the population is very similar. And as I’ve pointed out before, Boston has many more cops on the street than Seattle does.

Our budget is 50 percent greater than San Diego’s, yet we have 50 percent of San Diego’s population. San Antonio’s population is more than double Seattle’s, yet its budget is less than half of ours.

Dori: Durkan’s State of the City promises more of the Freeattle we know

San Antonio’s spending works out to $1,933 per capita. For Houston it’s $2,086 per person. San Diego’s spending is $3,071 per person. In Boston, it’s $5,094 per capita.

What about in Seattle? Seattle spends $8,977 per citizen.

That’s four times what San Antonio spends per capita. Have you been to Houston or San Diego? How about Boston or San Antonio? They’re nice cities. They all have a much better grip on homelessness. They have more cops per capita than Seattle. And yet we are spending twice, triple, or quadruple per person on our city budget — for a city overrun with crime, drugs, and homelessness.

How can this be? It’s what I have been telling you for decades. We have about the most inefficient local government in the country. We’ve got these high taxes, but we’re not getting any bang for our buck. Is this incompetence on the part of city leaders, or is it criminality? They have found a way to legally bilk you and me out of billions of dollars so that they can amass power and six-figure jobs for their connected favorites.

It’s either criminal or it’s horribly incompetent — you decide which.

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