Order Daniel Greenfield’s new book, Domestic Enemies: The Founding Fathers’ Fight Against the Left: HERE.
In 2018, there were 870,044 people in San Francisco and after years of decline, that number fell to an estimated 826,079 last year. A 5% population decline should have led to a spending decline, but instead the city budget shot up from $11 billion to $16 billion.
This was up from a $6.8 billion budget in 2012 for a roughly similar population of 828.963.
San Francisco had gone from spending $8,203 per person in 2012 to spending $12,643 per person in 2018 and is now at $19,369 per person. Not only did San Francisco’s budget more than double, but accounting for the population drop, its per person spending will soon triple.
Politicians like former Mayor Gavin Newsom could get away with skyrocketing budgets when the metropolitan population was rising, but the budgets keep rising even when people leave.
Even accounting for inflation, San Francisco’s budget is up 67% in 15 years while most residents believe that city services and quality of life have grown that much worse since then.
Where has all that money been going? The 2025 budget allocated $1.6 billion to grants, much of it going to homeless services, preschools and other welfare programs rife with fraud. In 2023, $125 million went to non-existent non-profits. The actual numbers are likely to be far worse.
The growth in spending isn’t driven by actual ‘per-person’ spending, but by welfare spending directed at the most dysfunctional elements of the population but actually going to politically aligned non-profits and community groups as well as the larger social services bureaucracy. None of this spending has made any measurable progress, but its real purpose is worsening social crises to justify the rising budgets when measured against a declining population.
Los Angeles County recently made headlines for suffering the nation’s leading population decline. The county’s population hit its peak of over 10 million in 2017 when the budget was at $31.6 billion. After dropping down 200,000 residents to around 9.8 million, the budget now stands at $45.4 billion. That’s an increase of nearly 50% despite the declining population.
The budget site for the County keeps the fiction alive by claiming that it needs the money to “meet the needs of our diverse community of 10 million residents.” The actual figures show that per person spending has increased from $3,160 to $4,592 even while the population dropped.
Last month, the notoriously corrupt LA County Board of Supervisors, which had removed an independent sheriff and hijacked his powers after he raided one of the supervisors, approved an $843 million Homeless Services budget. That’s up from a nearly $600 million homeless budget.
While the overall population of Los Angeles County has declined, the homeless population is up from 34,701 in 2016 to 72,195 in 2025. And that justifies spending nearly $1 billion on them.
The actual number of ‘homeless’, generally drug addicts and the mentally ill, is unknown. The homeless count conducted by ‘volunteers’ associated with homeless non-profits is generally considered worthless, but then again their dysfunction is just the cause for massive fraud.
An audit found of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, run by a crony of Mayor Karen Bass, found that it couldn’t account for $2.5 billion in spending, (not counting its CEO’s $430,000 salary) leading to the agency’s hijacking by the equally corrupt LA County Board of Supervisors which is already ramping up the spending to new levels, and San Francisco’s previously arrested homelessness non-profit CEO was arrested again and accused of misappropriating $1.2 million and driving around with a “a trunk full of high-priced jewelry”. Her big innovation had been a ‘safe sleeping’ tent program for the homeless at $61,000 per tent.
Back in Los Angeles, Mayor Bass’s highly touted $300 million ‘Inside Safe’ program for the homeless has a failure rate of 40%.while Gov. Gavin Newsom’s similar HomeKey initiative in Los Angeles is running as high as $1.5 million per room with over 1,000 units still vacant.
While homeless spending isn’t solving homelessness, it’s moving a lot of money around.
Creating social problems and then monetizing them has allowed California, San Francisco, Los Angeles County, and Los Angeles to continue spending money despite a falling population.
And the population drops are worse than state and local government authorities will admit.
After Trump shut down open borders, San Diego County had the sixth worst decline of any country in the country. The decline was driven by illegal alien migrants. Subtract illegal aliens and population declines across California would be showing up much more broadly. Those same illegals also help drive demand for more of the social services that drive spending.
The worse a program intended to solve a social problem performs, the more is spent on it.
The FBI recently raided the home and the school district office of Superintendent Alberto Carvalho of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) while the local DA came after its technical project manager over an alleged $22 million money laundering scheme. Carvalho had warned that LAUSD was facing a $1.6 billion deficit with an $18.8 billion budget.
That’s up from only $7.5 billion in 2017.
With numbers like that, you would think that the LA school district is booming and having to turn away students, but it actually suffered a 46% decline in enrollment since 2001.
In 2004, enrollment peaked at 750,000 students. It’s now down to 392,654. That’s down from 409,108 last year.
Superintendent Carvalho blamed the decline on ICE raids, but LAUSD enrollment was falling off a cliff back when Trump was a real estate tycoon. The truth is that LAUSD is a patchwork of half-empty schools kept afloat by demands from teachers’ unions and community pressures.
LAUSD spends $24,000 per pupil even as 53% of students don’t read at grade level while only 36% met math proficiency rates. These numbers were so spectacular they were celebrated.
“This is a proud moment,” Gov. Newsom held a press conference with Carvalho to announce the results that barely a third of the students in the nearly $19 billion school system can count.
“Los Angeles Unified is having a very special moment in history, one without precedent,” Carvalho claimed.
It’s understandable why a corrupt system spending more money on fewer people for worse results would be celebrating the fact that the next generation is incapable of basic arithmetic.
California has lost 200,000 people since 2020. Its budget climbed from $215 billion to $322 billion. Spending under Newsom is up 63%, his chief-of-staff, who effectively ran the state while he was prepping a presidential run, was recently raided by the FBI in a case that involved money being moved from the state’s former attorney general, now running to replace Newsom, while the current attorney general isn’t running after being entangled in another investigation.
576 California officials were convicted of federal crimes in just the last decade. Its legislature hides FBI investigations in the “public interest” and forces personnel to sign non-disclosure agreements. That’s why budgets continue to rise even as the population decreases, and why social crises, failing schools, homelessness, mass migration, are used to prop up that spending.
The worse the crises get, the more money California politicians and special interests make.
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