On a weekend-stay-over in Monterey recently, I saw some poster mentioning changes in the county budget and realized I had no perspective of the "order of magnitude" of this.
Looked it up, and found that the county budget is about one and a half billion dollars (!)
This made me curious about Santa Clara county, and I looked it up -- excess of six billion dollars (!) ... for some perspective, it would just make it to the top 100 in this list of countries ranked by budget.
Perhaps it's just me, but I found that ... surprising (i.e. Santa Clara county alone has a greater allocated budget than most countries).