For those who follow such things–Bill O’Reilly went off on a tirade about San Francisco for voting to bar military recruiters from public high school (and possibly college) campuses. The highlight of the rant was where he said “Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you’re not going to get another nickel in federal funds. Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead.” The he drifted off into inviting al Qaeda to blow up Coit Tower or something.
This got me wondering: San Francisco has a sizeable tax base, a natural source of fresh water (no water subsidies like LA and the Central Valley) and no freeways, and they had a major base closing about 11 years ago. Is it possible that San Francisco pays more money in taxes than it receives in federal services/subsidies/pork? It stands to reason that some places would have to, and most of California doesn’t. Is there any place on the web that tracks these things by city, state, region or metropolitan area?
I don’t know if there are figures to do this other than by state.
The Tax Foundation at http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/82.html has a document showing that “Some states feast at the expense of others”, with details by state. (From 2004, based on 2003 taxes.) [The Tax Foundation says they are “nonpartisan educational organization”, but they seem to me to have an anti-tax bias. Some organizations (Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, for example) have claimed that their reports are inaccurate, being based on estimates & projections rather than waiting until all tax returns are filed to issue their reports.]
This Steve Pearstein column (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19566-2005Jan18.html) covers the same issue, but in a much more political sense, as it links the winner/loser states to their red state/blue state presidential vote. And as a newspaper column, it has much less economic detail.
I’m sure there are other similar sites on the web, but these are a start.
I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but in the pit thread on this subject, people were saying that California gets back 80 cents on every dollar we pay in federal taxes.
Well, I don’t have hard data, but the population of San Francisco is what, like 750,000 or so? I just looked up, and the per capita income is $34,556.
Now there’s vastly different tax brackets, deductions, etc, but I’d say giving a net federal tax rate of 15% is fairly reasonably to get a ballpark figure for the entire city.
So a reasonable estimate of how much San Francisco pays in individual income tax is 3-4 billions of dollars a year. That’s just individual income tax, disregarding any other federal taxes.Now, I would doubt that the federal government spends even that much on K-12 education in the entire state of California much less San Francisco alone.
If I had to bet my life savings, I’d guess San Franciscans pay at least an order of magnitude more than they recieve back in federal funds of any kind. Maybe I’m wrong but it feels like that.
On this basis, no one would. After all, you are excluding all monies paid to foreign countries, all monies paid to retire debt and all monies paid to support the military in areas outside the various states. That’s a pretty sizeable chunk.
In general, a city will get a fair piece of federal funds back, if for no other reason than the relatively higher incidence of poverty compared to non-cities. But obviously San Francisco doesn’t get as much in, say, federal highway funds (though I imagine it gets a fair chunk given that two major interstates and a federal highway go right through the middle of it) compared to the city of Los Angeles, which is much vaster in size and has much more freeway milage in it.
The bottom line, though, is that comparisons like this are really a bad idea. Every state when it signs up to be part of this country doesn’t expect that the monies paid in by its citizens will be returned back in “fair” share. After all, if it was, wouldn’t it be preferable not to have the federal government and just let the state pay for whatever is needed? Rather, we pay in what we need, and we have Congress decide what to spend it on.
Trust me that the San Francisco city schools will not risk losing federal funds, no matter how much they might hate military recruiters. But it might take losing a lawsuit to make them give up. Hell, in a similar situation, Nevada actually created a speed limit for its highways and issued traffic tickets, and trust me, that wasn’t by choice!
Well, the seed of my question is this: In Bill O’Reilly’s “I am the president” fantasy, he has the ability to say “No more federal funds for you.” He’s saying it to a city that probably pays more in taxes than it receives in federal loot (a claim that my hometown of Washington can’t make, and neither, if memory serves, can New York, LA or Boston). I’m just curious: On how many levels is this an empty, nonsensical threat?
As a side issue: Is there a reason San Francisco doesn’t get its drinking water from the two fairly large rivers (Sacramento and San Joachim) that merge and empty into San Francisco Bay?
O’Reilly just is too stupid to know that what he proposes might be San Francisco’s wildest fantasy. My best guess is that SF pays more to Fedgov than it receives back. But the big advantages is that SF if they seceded would get FREE military protection from the US. They’d have the same advantage Mexico does. There is NO WAY the US would allow invading Chinese hoards (or whatever nation) to sack SF or Mexico due to proximity.
Besides, O’Reilly spouts nonsense. I seem to recall back in the 1860s the US fought a war (anyone recall the name?) to stop some states from seceding. I’d say it is a settled issue secession AIN’T allowed.
San Francisco owns the water rights for Hetch Hetchy. The City built (and still owns) O’Shaughnessy Dam, and the SFPUC runs the entire system. So, it’s not subsidized by the Feds, which I think was the OP’s point.
Of course, if things got really nasty between SF and the Feds or the State of California, SF would be hard-pressed to defend its water supply by force.
For FY 2003 (latest results available, I believe), it was $0.78 returned per dollar. Cite.
The Sacramento River is tidal at least up to Sacramento, and the San Joaquin River is tidal at least up to Stockton. So for SF to get fresh water, it’d have to build a lengthy aqueduct anyway (>70 miles) – and agricultural runoff means these rivers are both pretty polluted, so extensive purification would be necessary.
Hetch Hetchy water is essentially Sierra Nevada snowmelt, and results in SF having one of the best-tasting municipal water supplies (IMHO) around.
Not quite correct, actually. The intakes for fresh water sent south by way of the California Aqueduct are in the delta itself (the Banks Pumping Plant is just north of the intersections of Interstates 580 and 205, east of the Bay area. While there is some intrusion of salt water into the very end of the delta, it isn’t the reason that San Francisco gets its water from the Hetch Hetchy valley.
San Francisco isn’t entitled to water from the delta because it isn’t a land owner along the banks of either river. So, way back in the early 1900’s, the city looked for water rights it could purchase in order to secure a supply of fresh water. That being the era of the big water project (the Los Angeles Aqueduct was started not much later), they secured fresh snowmelt waters in the Sierra Nevada, and trapped them in a reservoir, then sent them by aqueduct and tunnel to the Crystal Springs reservoir, just south of the city. From there, it is distributed to San Francisco and a few other bay area cities.
I think a major point is being missed here. San Francisco City/County may or may not get a huge amount of money from the Feds, but schools everywhere do. In fact, the way the Federal government controls the schools is through the use of money (i.e. obey our mandates or no nachos for you). A school or a district that is denied federal funding would be near bankruptcy within a year.
I think you’re missing the big point. O’Reilly is proposing cutting off San Francisco from receving federal funds. At no point did he advocate San Francisco would stop paying taxes into the federal budget.
I’m not sure it makes sense to even ask the question about the net flow of federal funds into a city. Does SF benefit from federal funds for Interstates that don’t actually enter SF, but connect it to the rest of the state/country? How about SFO, which is not in SF proper. While this kind of analysis makes reasonable sense at the state level, I don’t see how you could accurately measure it at the city level.
The other thing about the SF proposition is whether or not the city has the authority to exclude military recruitment from schools. Although I don’t know for sure, I wouldn’t be surprised if this sort of decision must be made at the state level. Any CA educators want to weigh in on that question?
For years, the Portland (OR) School District excluded military recruiters because of the DoD policy on homosexuals.[sup]1[/sup] I’m fairly sure that they did not lose federal funds as a result of this exclusion.
[sup]1[/sup] I believe the exclusion has been recinded some time in the past couple years, but am not sure about that.
I don’t know about high schools, but the Feds have threatened to cut of funding to universities because banning the military from recruiting is usually agaist a schools bylaws on free speech that allow almost any legit business to recruit on campus.
The issue has come up because there is now a federal law requiring that military recruiters receive the same access that college recruiters can have. The relevant sections of federal law are 10 U.S.C. §503c and 20 U.S.C. §7908. Failure to provide such access can result under the relevant acts in loss of federal education funds.
