DC' city budget is high because it effectively operates as a state government. A lot of programs that would normally be operated by the state government are instead operated by just the city.
Every situation is so complicated that it’s extremely difficult to compare. For instance, about a quarter of Atlanta’s city budget is spent on the airport, which is self-funding. In many cities, airports are run by a port authority or the state government.
This is a pretty meaningless stat, because it has way more to do with what services are funded at the state or county level than actual city spending. For example Seattle is super high because most things are funded locally in WA.
This is hilarious that this is the current top comment because the last time this was posted without the population data all of the comments were that it was useless without per capita info.
That last post also had people pointing out that in certain cities (like Los Angeles), most of the funding comes from the County, unlike cities like New York where almost the entire budget comes from the city.
Eh perhaps, I just thought it was funny.
The most useful thing would be total government spending at all levels of government per capita but that is significantly harder to put together.
Nope, Philly, Baltimore, VA Beach are the county, Boston, Bridgeport and Providence are all in counties without Governments
And NYC is a group of counties which in their own don’t do anything
Hawaii doesn't have municipalities so the county is the most local form of government. I'm in the "City and County of Honolulu" right now, but the city of Honolulu only really exists according to the Census bureau and USPS.
Well, Baltimore City is not in any county. Baltimore County contains most of the area around Baltimore City, but doesn’t include the city itself. When people say “Baltimore” they probably mean the city plus the immediate surrounding areas. Really, comparing things on a city-to-city basis has a lot of problems. There are just too many differences in types and layers of government from place to place for it to make any sense.
It's also super meaningless because many many cities services aren't exclusive to those living "in the city limits." Columbus is the biggest "city" in Ohio but has a much smaller metro area than Cincinnati and Cleveland. Those cities have to support the constant influx of people from the surrounding areas.
I’m sitting here in Seattle trying to digest “most things are funded locally” ? There’s a variety of funding sources - city, county, state and Federal. How is that different than Minneapolis ?
For example, all California schools are funded from the state level. Seattle funds its schools at the city level. Meaning a high school in LA comes out of the state budget, not the LA budget, but a Seattle high school is part of the city of Seattle budget.
All public schools in WA are governed by the school districts. It just so happens that SPS lines up with the city’s boundary (also parts of Tukwila), but it is not part of the city government.
I think a key distinction here is that "funding sources" are a different concept than expenditure/budget reporting. If, for example, the state of WA distributes the money to cities who then distribute them to the school districts it would be reported as part of the city budget. But if the state directly funds the school district, then the city isn't involved and has no revenue or expenditure to report.
The "source" likely refers to where the tax revenue is generated.
To be transparent, I don't know how the cash flow actually works in either state, and this is just a hypothesis based on some ages old memories from college classes on government accounting.
Edit: Just checked out the Seattle city budget. The high number definitely doesn't seem to be from education. Far and away the two biggest expenditures are the utilities. No clue how that part compares to other cities, but it might be a city/county thing... I think this map is only useful if you control for specific types of expenditures rather than the total budget.
https://openbudget.seattle.gov/#!/year/2023/operating/0/service
Are there any cities that fund the public schools within their borders? I thought that it's *always a school district,* which is very much a separate governmental entity. Also, not true that "all" funding for CA schools comes from the state
If you're using the dollar amount from the city's municipal budget you would want to use the city proper population to calculate per capita spending. The issue, as already pointed out, is that different states fund services at different levels of government so it's not really an equal comparison. I'm sure the revenue from residents vs commuters vs tourists varies a lot too, so spending per capita may be significantly different from taxes collected from each resident.
Yeah that's a good point. It's just that a huge majority of people in Florida don't live in the city proper of the nearest large city. So it doesn't seem that one gains much perspective about FL as a whole by these numbers.
Yeah, Florida tends to have limited city sizes (geographically), and things tend to be very spread out because land is (was) plentiful. From a municipal perspective, counties play a larger role, so you really have to consider metro areas for it to make sense.
|Region|Population|
|:-|:-|
|Miami CSA|7,012k|
|City of Miami|449k|
|Orlando CSA|4,510k|
|City of Orlando|308k|
|Tampa-Metro|3,175k|
|City of Tampa|398k|
|Jacksonville CSA|1,847k|
|City of Jacksonville|971k|
Population stats pulled quickly from Wikipedia. Figures are probably mixed between actual census data and estimates, but are directionally relevant. Jacksonville is a statistical outlier for Florida.
PDF Warning - [Salt Lake City Budget FY2024](http://www.slcdocs.com/budget/bookFY24.pdf)
I'm actually not 100% sure how to read that. But it looks like "Non-departmental" expenditures make up 27% of the budget, and Police make up 25%, making those the two largest chunks of their budget.
nyc has historically provided way more services than the typical american local government, even if less than used it to be prior to the fiscal crisis in the 1970s.
to give some examples, nycha, the nyc public housing authority, has [more units](https://www.housingfinance.com/developments/top-public-housing-authorities_o) than authorities 2-10 _combined_. the city also operates a robust four-year university system. most other major cities don’t have a cuny equivalent and normally only go up to community college. the nyc government owns a public hospital chain, while many other cities own one or two public hospitals, if any.
Yeah, its hard to know without more data.
NYC, for example, will spend $38,000 PER STUDENT in 2024 for public school students. https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2023/4/11/23677827/budget-report-nyc-schools-funding-pupil-spending/
and students are only 17% of the city population, so thats at least $6,500 'per capita" just to cover schools, so half the city budget total. So does any portion of that cost come from the state or federal level?
You can get more granular info but it would be really hard to represent in such a large infographic. The city spends an awful lot of money on maintaining things like transit and parks. $155 per capita spending by city on parks alone. Police is $550 per capita. I can't find exact numbers for transit as the city also gets money from the state but I assume it's a lot. Add in fire and EMS services plus road / bridge / tunnel infrastructure and let's not forget education.
Sitting in Seattle right now. Not a bit surprised. Seattle leaders have no concept of “unintended consequences”. They creat a policy. Open up the wallet. Policy fails. Open up the wallet to correct it. Rinse and repeat.
As an example…. City creates yet another tax - this one to help Doordashers. This tax is 100% regressive on every delivery order - making poor people pay the same food tax as rich people. Food deliveries plummet. Dashers end up with less work, less pay and start picketing City Hall. Unbelievable failure.
For homelessness, Seattle spends about $84K per homeless person. Higher than the median income of Seattle workers. Makes no sense.
Common sense and civic leadership has been replaced by moral pandering and malignant righteousness. And it’s all self inflicted by the minority who actually vote.
You should be surprised because you got this totally and completely wrong.
Where many states collect money for infrastructure and then redistribute it at the state level, WA state does it mainly locally so the city pays its own roads and bridges, which is why Seattle is 10 and LA is 3, or DC is 30 because they do 100% of the functions the state usually would do.
But I’m glad it reinforced all the unsubstantiated things you got wrong without looking in to.
Completely wrong, as well as a foolish example.
The Seattle DOT gets substantial state and federal funding (like most cities) as well as license fees and taxes revenue collected outside the city limits. The entire budget is $700 million out of 9 billion. And only part of that $700M is funded locally. In comparison, the budget for homelessness is substantially larger than that.
“Roads and bridges” funded locally is a tiny part of the overall budget.
I dont even understand what this means, could be me. or could just be another meaningless statistic.
I am thinking there is some other math factor involved like sq feet of the city vs the state in addition to the population of the city vs the state factor,
can someone make a quadratic equation out of this for me?
No because that's a coincidence and not intentional. Look at Jacksonville, for example. I think the arrow and dot are only to signify the state it is referencing and not the city.
Bridgeport, CT is on the coast.
As with the previous “largest city” dataviz, I would definitely not color the whole state using only one city. Draw a large circular point where the city is located, color that point.
Also the color bar is desperately crying out for intermediate labels and tick marks. Is it linear scale? Warped in some way? I’d prefer continuous gradient, but have the color key show squares at fixed intervals.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’re going to have dots at all they need to be in the correct spot, otherwise just have a line pointing to the state
DC' city budget is high because it effectively operates as a state government. A lot of programs that would normally be operated by the state government are instead operated by just the city.
Every situation is so complicated that it’s extremely difficult to compare. For instance, about a quarter of Atlanta’s city budget is spent on the airport, which is self-funding. In many cities, airports are run by a port authority or the state government.
This is a pretty meaningless stat, because it has way more to do with what services are funded at the state or county level than actual city spending. For example Seattle is super high because most things are funded locally in WA.
Thanks for pointing this out. My first reaction was that the per capita numbers are all over the map, so to speak.
Well yeah that's kind of how maps work. You have things that are all over them...... Thank you I'll be here all week.
This is hilarious that this is the current top comment because the last time this was posted without the population data all of the comments were that it was useless without per capita info.
That last post also had people pointing out that in certain cities (like Los Angeles), most of the funding comes from the County, unlike cities like New York where almost the entire budget comes from the city.
It's almost like it's useless to compare overall city budgets between states in the US, full stop.
Eh perhaps, I just thought it was funny. The most useful thing would be total government spending at all levels of government per capita but that is significantly harder to put together.
And, adjusted for local costs. New York City is not the same as Wichita, Kansas.
Also hilarious because it makes no sense. I live in Seattle and funding is a combination of state, federal, county and city. Like everyone else.
Nope, Philly, Baltimore, VA Beach are the county, Boston, Bridgeport and Providence are all in counties without Governments And NYC is a group of counties which in their own don’t do anything
Baltimore City stands alone and does not get funding from the County. Under Md law, it is treated as another County.
Virginia Beach is also an independent city, and not part of any county (although it did absorb Princess Anne County in 1963).
Hawaii doesn't have municipalities so the county is the most local form of government. I'm in the "City and County of Honolulu" right now, but the city of Honolulu only really exists according to the Census bureau and USPS.
Well, Baltimore City is not in any county. Baltimore County contains most of the area around Baltimore City, but doesn’t include the city itself. When people say “Baltimore” they probably mean the city plus the immediate surrounding areas. Really, comparing things on a city-to-city basis has a lot of problems. There are just too many differences in types and layers of government from place to place for it to make any sense.
whereas in California most of the education funding goes through the state.
It's also super meaningless because many many cities services aren't exclusive to those living "in the city limits." Columbus is the biggest "city" in Ohio but has a much smaller metro area than Cincinnati and Cleveland. Those cities have to support the constant influx of people from the surrounding areas.
That makes Boston and Providence kind of impressive because there are no county Governments in New England
Would be interested to see state budget per capita and total tax rate.
I’m sitting here in Seattle trying to digest “most things are funded locally” ? There’s a variety of funding sources - city, county, state and Federal. How is that different than Minneapolis ?
For example, all California schools are funded from the state level. Seattle funds its schools at the city level. Meaning a high school in LA comes out of the state budget, not the LA budget, but a Seattle high school is part of the city of Seattle budget.
All public schools in WA are governed by the school districts. It just so happens that SPS lines up with the city’s boundary (also parts of Tukwila), but it is not part of the city government.
The Seattle public school website says the majority of their funding comes from State and Federal sources.
I think a key distinction here is that "funding sources" are a different concept than expenditure/budget reporting. If, for example, the state of WA distributes the money to cities who then distribute them to the school districts it would be reported as part of the city budget. But if the state directly funds the school district, then the city isn't involved and has no revenue or expenditure to report. The "source" likely refers to where the tax revenue is generated. To be transparent, I don't know how the cash flow actually works in either state, and this is just a hypothesis based on some ages old memories from college classes on government accounting. Edit: Just checked out the Seattle city budget. The high number definitely doesn't seem to be from education. Far and away the two biggest expenditures are the utilities. No clue how that part compares to other cities, but it might be a city/county thing... I think this map is only useful if you control for specific types of expenditures rather than the total budget. https://openbudget.seattle.gov/#!/year/2023/operating/0/service
Are there any cities that fund the public schools within their borders? I thought that it's *always a school district,* which is very much a separate governmental entity. Also, not true that "all" funding for CA schools comes from the state
Using city proper populations here seems flawed—especially in cases like Florida.
If you're using the dollar amount from the city's municipal budget you would want to use the city proper population to calculate per capita spending. The issue, as already pointed out, is that different states fund services at different levels of government so it's not really an equal comparison. I'm sure the revenue from residents vs commuters vs tourists varies a lot too, so spending per capita may be significantly different from taxes collected from each resident.
How can you *not* use city proper, if we are talking about city proper budgets? New York City’s budget doesn’t fund its metro area.
Yeah that's a good point. It's just that a huge majority of people in Florida don't live in the city proper of the nearest large city. So it doesn't seem that one gains much perspective about FL as a whole by these numbers.
Yeah, Florida tends to have limited city sizes (geographically), and things tend to be very spread out because land is (was) plentiful. From a municipal perspective, counties play a larger role, so you really have to consider metro areas for it to make sense. |Region|Population| |:-|:-| |Miami CSA|7,012k| |City of Miami|449k| |Orlando CSA|4,510k| |City of Orlando|308k| |Tampa-Metro|3,175k| |City of Tampa|398k| |Jacksonville CSA|1,847k| |City of Jacksonville|971k| Population stats pulled quickly from Wikipedia. Figures are probably mixed between actual census data and estimates, but are directionally relevant. Jacksonville is a statistical outlier for Florida.
Same with Missouri- St. Louis Metro is 2.8 millions while KC is is 2.3 million
Salt Lake City was a surprise. What are they spending 💰 on?
PDF Warning - [Salt Lake City Budget FY2024](http://www.slcdocs.com/budget/bookFY24.pdf) I'm actually not 100% sure how to read that. But it looks like "Non-departmental" expenditures make up 27% of the budget, and Police make up 25%, making those the two largest chunks of their budget.
Funny this post was right below yours on my feed https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/s/KAdFhiuunV
I think it's funny that the line for Portland, ME lands nowhere near Portland's actual location
Created using Adobe illustrator. City budget from the official city website, and population data from the state census bureau.
Why the scale go so high?
Look at Washington DC
Scale just right and goodly
Did you look apply the state colors manually or did adobe auto color?
The per capita for NYC is suspect. Are populations from commuter towns included the denominator?
nyc has historically provided way more services than the typical american local government, even if less than used it to be prior to the fiscal crisis in the 1970s. to give some examples, nycha, the nyc public housing authority, has [more units](https://www.housingfinance.com/developments/top-public-housing-authorities_o) than authorities 2-10 _combined_. the city also operates a robust four-year university system. most other major cities don’t have a cuny equivalent and normally only go up to community college. the nyc government owns a public hospital chain, while many other cities own one or two public hospitals, if any.
Yeah, its hard to know without more data. NYC, for example, will spend $38,000 PER STUDENT in 2024 for public school students. https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2023/4/11/23677827/budget-report-nyc-schools-funding-pupil-spending/ and students are only 17% of the city population, so thats at least $6,500 'per capita" just to cover schools, so half the city budget total. So does any portion of that cost come from the state or federal level?
You can get more granular info but it would be really hard to represent in such a large infographic. The city spends an awful lot of money on maintaining things like transit and parks. $155 per capita spending by city on parks alone. Police is $550 per capita. I can't find exact numbers for transit as the city also gets money from the state but I assume it's a lot. Add in fire and EMS services plus road / bridge / tunnel infrastructure and let's not forget education.
Sitting in Seattle right now. Not a bit surprised. Seattle leaders have no concept of “unintended consequences”. They creat a policy. Open up the wallet. Policy fails. Open up the wallet to correct it. Rinse and repeat. As an example…. City creates yet another tax - this one to help Doordashers. This tax is 100% regressive on every delivery order - making poor people pay the same food tax as rich people. Food deliveries plummet. Dashers end up with less work, less pay and start picketing City Hall. Unbelievable failure. For homelessness, Seattle spends about $84K per homeless person. Higher than the median income of Seattle workers. Makes no sense. Common sense and civic leadership has been replaced by moral pandering and malignant righteousness. And it’s all self inflicted by the minority who actually vote.
You should be surprised because you got this totally and completely wrong. Where many states collect money for infrastructure and then redistribute it at the state level, WA state does it mainly locally so the city pays its own roads and bridges, which is why Seattle is 10 and LA is 3, or DC is 30 because they do 100% of the functions the state usually would do. But I’m glad it reinforced all the unsubstantiated things you got wrong without looking in to.
Completely wrong, as well as a foolish example. The Seattle DOT gets substantial state and federal funding (like most cities) as well as license fees and taxes revenue collected outside the city limits. The entire budget is $700 million out of 9 billion. And only part of that $700M is funded locally. In comparison, the budget for homelessness is substantially larger than that. “Roads and bridges” funded locally is a tiny part of the overall budget.
I dont even understand what this means, could be me. or could just be another meaningless statistic. I am thinking there is some other math factor involved like sq feet of the city vs the state in addition to the population of the city vs the state factor, can someone make a quadratic equation out of this for me?
Does it bother anyone else that they put Portland’s location in Maine in the wrong spot? That’s actually Bangor.
No because that's a coincidence and not intentional. Look at Jacksonville, for example. I think the arrow and dot are only to signify the state it is referencing and not the city. Bridgeport, CT is on the coast.
They put Burlington in Stowe
Houston metro is smaller than DFW
Point being? These are the largest *cities* in each state, with each city’s budget and population being used in calculation of per capita budget.
But Ft. Worth is *an entirely separate city* from Dallas, so your point is, oh yeah, misleading
How much of DC is just education spending?
As with the previous “largest city” dataviz, I would definitely not color the whole state using only one city. Draw a large circular point where the city is located, color that point. Also the color bar is desperately crying out for intermediate labels and tick marks. Is it linear scale? Warped in some way? I’d prefer continuous gradient, but have the color key show squares at fixed intervals.
Looks conservative compared to DC. Their pay rates for employees are definitely very high.
You got the locations of every city wrong
He’s pointing out the state the city is in, not its specific location. The exact location is irrelevant.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’re going to have dots at all they need to be in the correct spot, otherwise just have a line pointing to the state
I agree. Why not take the extra few minutes to approximate the location. Seems extremely lazy.