America's Worst-Run City Should Come As No Surprise

A recent study by an outfit called WalletHub, a personal finance site, has released a study of America's best-run and, not to be left out, worst-run cities. As far as the best-run cities, congrats to the top five, we suppose: Nampa, ID; Lexington-Fayette, KY; Boise, ID; Nashua, NH; and Oklahoma City, OK. The criteria used reportedly measured the cities' operating efficiency; Wallethub's analyst, one Cassandra (yes, I realize the irony of that name) Happe, states:

The best-run cities in America use their budgets most effectively to provide high-quality financial security, education, health, safety and transportation to their residents. Many of the top cities also have a very low amount of outstanding government debt per capita, which can prevent financial troubles in the future.

Look at those criteria and think about them for a moment: financial security, education, health, safety, and transportation. Next, scroll all the way down and look at the cities that are the worst. You guessed it - San Francisco, CA, is the worst, with Oakland in second place.

The first thought that came to mind on reading that was that you don't have to be Dick Tracy to figure that out.

Years of "progressive" governance have turned these cities into literal hellholes. It's not just the municipal governments; California has, through years of super-majority Democrat rule, laid waste to much of the state. Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Riverside are all towards the bottom of this list as well.

RECEIPTS PROVIDED: Violent Crime Skyrockets in CA But Newsom's Attempting to Block Tough-on-Crime Reforms

These cities are, quite literally, melting down. Oakland - amazingly only the second-worst city on this list - can't carry out street work, as the city can't even assure the workers that they won't be robbed on the job.

There's a lot more to a city than just how the city government uses its budget, but that is, as WalletHub asserts, a pretty good indicator, and when a city can't even keep the people working on the streets safe, that says a lot about how much of their resources they are putting into the "safety" portion of the equation. And as far as the Bidenville homeless enclaves (maybe in California we should call them Newsomvilles) well, if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be worth ten times that.

This, of course, is the second-worst city on the list. Here's the worst.

That's right. Employees are being told to stay in their building at lunchtime, where they are safe - meaning they are not safe on the streets.

One of the few legitimate roles of the government - any government - is to protect the liberty and property of the people. The municipal governments of San Francisco and Oakland have failed, utterly. But there's an argument to be made that the voters in these cities have failed themselves; they are, after all, responsible for who is running those cities. This is what decades of progressive governance have wrought. And it's a good bet that few of these people will change their voting habits unless things get a lot worse - which begs the question, just what will that "worse" look like? Will Escape from L.A. have a Bay Area sequel in real life?

Just out of curiosity, I looked for cities in my state; Anchorage and Fairbanks both run in the middle of the pack. Sometimes it's OK to be mediocre, I guess.

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