It is outrageous indeed. Every time I walk by a homeless person sleeping in the cold on the sidewalk, I am reminded of this figure.
Thats $87 per citizen in SF.
That accounts for 0.39% of my taxes in a given year, and I don't even make that much money because I just graduated college.
I'm saying, $87 a year out of my taxes is a tiny amount when you consider what you pay for other things. How much do you spend a year on defense? Since the effective tax rate is around 30% (roughly) and the defense budget is around 20% of the federal budget (roughly), I pay around 52x more for defense than for helping homeless people in a given year. Is defense 52x more important than social services? And I say this being a defense contractor who entire livelyhood depends on taxes and the military industrial complex.
Otherwise, what would the state be doing? If the state spends a bunch of money on roads, it spends it on roads in towns. You might be driving down the street in your town seeing construction, but that money came from state taxes not town taxes.
The same goes for programs big and samll. Medicaid is money collected on the federal level, but paid out on the state level.