Here's my trick - convert the number to $ per family per year.

So for a public library, you'd take 50k and multiply by 12 and get 600k/yr. Then you'd find the number of families served by the library, and divide that out. 600 families? That's 1k per family per year, too much. 6000 families? 100 per family per year, still high but not insane. 60000 families? Now we're down to $10. And if it were Chicago with 1 million families (or households which can be an easier number to find) we're at 60 cents per. Not bad.

You can do similar things at state and national levels to get a ballpark feeling. Student loan forgiveness will cost $400 billion over 30 years, let's say. There are about 122 million households, so forgiveness costs $3300 per household over 30 years, or $110 a year. At this point you can decide how much it's worth worrying about.

I always feel like Software licenses are a different beast. For example, 300k in Windows license costs might not be mulch out of a 50M budget, but it is much when you think about the fact that these costs could also be zero.