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According to San Francisco Mayor London Breed, what her city needs most is GIFT money—as in Guaranteed Income for Trans. As a Bay Area news outlet reported last week:
Breed announced the launch of a new guaranteed income program for San Francisco's trans community. The Guaranteed Income for Trans People program will provide low-income transgender San Franciscans with $1,200 each month, for up to 18 months, to help address financial insecurity within trans communities.
Nobody can ruin a bad idea like the Golden Gate City. GIFT is a spin on Universal Basic Income, or UBI, the quasi-libertarian, ostensibly socialist wonkish platform of the failed 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang. But while Yang intended to distribute modest handouts to everyone, Breed took the idea further left, securing a monthly stipend for a favored identity group.
Whereas the old-school Left wanted to help the dispossessed regardless of who they are, today's progressives bestow their generosity on identitarian grounds. Tom Wolfe saw the situation coming in 1970 in Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers. The essay, partly researched in the San Francisco Bay Area, describes identity groups making threatening gestures to secure government handouts.
Two San Francisco nonprofits, along with three city departments, including the Office of Transgender Initiatives, are responsible for designing the program. (Why San Francisco—or any other city—needs an office of transgender initiatives, I don't know, but it appears to be perfectly capable of gifting taxpayer money.) Although the nonprofits in question are not required to reveal their finances, the city generously funds multiple charitable agencies, so taxpayers are likely paying for more than the city department's share of the program's cost.
In other words, multiple government and quasi-government actors dedicated to work with the trans "community" invested their labor into securing further funds. Spending taxpayer money on a minority group only ensures further expenditures.
A poorly advertised fact about the stipend: one doesn't need to be transgender to apply. "Nonbinary" and "gender nonconforming" individuals are also considered. But a mere 55 individuals will be selected for GIFT.
I hope the work of the nonprofits responsible for dispensing the money will be closely monitored. Because, really, do we know how these 55 lucky characters—out of the obviously much larger number of residents in the qualified population—will be selected to receive taxpayer money?
San Francisco has already been giving handouts on the basis of preferred identity categories. A similar program for black and Pacific Islander "mothers and pregnant people" is already in place. (What are Latinas, chopped liver?) Other recipients include artists who fell on hard times during the lockdowns. Most artists moved to Oakland and Portland many years ago, but the city managed to find 190 who didn't. They now get $1,000 a month for having a San Francisco address.
Just how San Francisco manages to spend its money is shrouded in mystery. This year, the city of fewer than a million people, most of them wealthy—the median household income is almost $120,000—posted a budget of nearly $14 billion. To be fair, income inequality in the City by the Bay is quite a spectacle: destitute drug addicts took over the once-flourishing upscale neighborhoods. Since the beginning of 2021, the city managed to spend $1.1 billion on the homeless, who remain just as destitute and drug-addicted as ever.
The city spent $22 million on the Tenderloin Linkage Center, an illegal open-air "safe injection" site where government employees supervised junkies consuming opiates. Then it spent half a million more on a study that showed improvement in quality of life in the Center's neighborhood. Needless to say, those who live and do business in the area dispute the conclusion. The methodology used by the city staff is dubious—it amounted to walking around the block once a year in three different years. In the meantime, the area became a doper magnet with emergency calls on the city block increasing by 126 percent, compared to 11 percent citywide.
The overarching governing philosophy in San Francisco is to spend. Sure, this November citizens overwhelmingly approved a measure that allows oversight of expenditures on homelessness. But that was a very modest taxpayer rebellion—if it can be called that at all.
San Franciscans still have a habit of spending other people's money. Consider this telling tweet by a San Francisco Chronicle columnist, commenting on Elon Musk's $44 billion purchase of Twitter, headquartered not far from the Tenderloin Center:
$44 billion could....
Build 44,000 homes in San Francisco.
Pay 675,000 teachers for a year.
Help the SF Food Bank provide 88 billion meals.
Build 26,000 wildly overpriced $1.7 million public toilets.
Fund San Francisco government for 3 1/3 years.
Or....ruin Twitter?
That public toilet cost is not a joke. The municipality recently unveiled a plan to build one for $1.7 million. In a fit of civic masochism, San Franciscans can't stop ridiculing the plan. But they're unwilling to extend their logic to the city's other spending. Few in this allegedly libertarian city seem to understand that the root of the problem lies in the view that the government can solve every problem by spending more money.
Observe that, even with her aside about a wasteful government plan, the columnist is still more concerned about the money Musk paid for Twitter, as if Twitter—or Musk's money—belongs to San Francisco.
Musk is doing for Twitter what the city of San Francisco seems to find unthinkable: cutting back on company spending and unnecessary positions. And guess what—Twitter is still around. Frugality works.
Our most cherished values are not transactional. Freedom of speech is worth more than 26,000 public toilets. And liberty and a smoothly run government are contingent not on generous subsidies, but on the prevalent mindset of a society.
Katya Sedgwick is a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
