Mods, is there value in moving the parking convo to its own thread?
- 3,781
Regarding the City earnings tax, I am torn. As a city resident, I would hate to see what losing a third of our budget would do to the City. On the flipside, I would love to dispose of it to attract new business to the City. It is a double-edged sword. If they could replace it, without damaging the city in any way, I'd be all for it. However, that remains to be seen. Considering the current budget shortfalls and the fact that there is not going to be a trimming of fat down at City Hall anytime soon, a third of the budget being cut would be devastated to us city dwellers. In the end, I hope this leads to 'real' discussions about City/County merger.
Regarding City budget cuts, does anyone know if the City has officially gone to once a week trash pick up? It may be a coincidence, but my alley does not have one non-yard waste dumpster that doesn't have the lid sitting up completely straight with trash 3 feet over the limit. If it is a coincidence, we are going to be in big trouble once they do go to once a week pick up. Summers could get very smelly and neighborhoods full of unwelcomed guests. The thing that the City is not accounting for is dumping. City dumpsters are used by many 'other people' (non-residents, contractors, random dumpers, etc) to dump excess trash. I recall countless times when I couldn't get one regular bag into the dumpster because it was overflowing with drywall and other 'dumped' junk.
Regarding City budget cuts, does anyone know if the City has officially gone to once a week trash pick up? It may be a coincidence, but my alley does not have one non-yard waste dumpster that doesn't have the lid sitting up completely straight with trash 3 feet over the limit. If it is a coincidence, we are going to be in big trouble once they do go to once a week pick up. Summers could get very smelly and neighborhoods full of unwelcomed guests. The thing that the City is not accounting for is dumping. City dumpsters are used by many 'other people' (non-residents, contractors, random dumpers, etc) to dump excess trash. I recall countless times when I couldn't get one regular bag into the dumpster because it was overflowing with drywall and other 'dumped' junk.
The problem is not the amount of the earnings tax. The problem is simply that the earnings tax exists. Even if it were lowered to 0.10% people would still complain about it. It is a clear disincentive to doing business in the city, and it was created at a time when most people worked downtown. Now jobs are spread across the metro, and STL City needs to compete with the surrounding region to attract talent and jobs. To stay competitive, the earnings tax needs to go.
Hopefully the leaders in St. Louis and Kansas City can try to make up for the revenue. One suggestion that I have liked is the land value tax based on location, not on improvements to the property. Add to that an "abandoned property/vacant land/surface parking lot" tax to kick some of these landowners in the pants and get them to start building.
One of the common excuses for maintaining the earnings tax is that 1% is a pittance, but that is 1% percent more that you don't have to pay in St. Louis County. 1% may not seem like much money, but the fact that this debate keeps coming up proves that it is an undeniable sticking point.
For example, say you have are a CEO of a business with 1000 employees and you are thinking of relocating from out of town to the St. Louis metro. You are measuring the pros and cons of the city v. the county, and you start asking your employees what they think. I am willing to bet that one of the biggest gripes with moving into the city would be giving up that 1%. If you make $100,000+ per year and you pay the earnings tax, that is $1,000. That's a lot of money for most people, and worth sending a quick email to the boss explaining that you rather locate to the County to avoid paying the tax. Now, as the boss, you have hundreds of employees telling you they don't want to pay that 1%.
Additionally, as the boss, it is possible that you make millions of dollars per year. For you and the rest of your high earning, decision making board of directors/executive committee, the earnings tax means you could lose tens of thousands of dollars per year.
All other things being equal, where would you move?
Finally, as to trash, and I may be ignorant on this point, but why doesn't everyone just pay for their own trash service? Seems like an easy thing to cut from the budget.
Hopefully the leaders in St. Louis and Kansas City can try to make up for the revenue. One suggestion that I have liked is the land value tax based on location, not on improvements to the property. Add to that an "abandoned property/vacant land/surface parking lot" tax to kick some of these landowners in the pants and get them to start building.
One of the common excuses for maintaining the earnings tax is that 1% is a pittance, but that is 1% percent more that you don't have to pay in St. Louis County. 1% may not seem like much money, but the fact that this debate keeps coming up proves that it is an undeniable sticking point.
For example, say you have are a CEO of a business with 1000 employees and you are thinking of relocating from out of town to the St. Louis metro. You are measuring the pros and cons of the city v. the county, and you start asking your employees what they think. I am willing to bet that one of the biggest gripes with moving into the city would be giving up that 1%. If you make $100,000+ per year and you pay the earnings tax, that is $1,000. That's a lot of money for most people, and worth sending a quick email to the boss explaining that you rather locate to the County to avoid paying the tax. Now, as the boss, you have hundreds of employees telling you they don't want to pay that 1%.
Additionally, as the boss, it is possible that you make millions of dollars per year. For you and the rest of your high earning, decision making board of directors/executive committee, the earnings tax means you could lose tens of thousands of dollars per year.
All other things being equal, where would you move?
Finally, as to trash, and I may be ignorant on this point, but why doesn't everyone just pay for their own trash service? Seems like an easy thing to cut from the budget.
- 3,781
^Seems like an easy fix charging every individual for trash pick-up, but then again, the City is trying to get people to move there and that has always been a selling point. On top of that, how many low income families can afford trash pick up on top of their other bills. Sounds like the City will then have a major dumping problem and piles of trash everywhere if the start charging. I have no issue paying, if I thought if would help the City, but I think there are many other places to cut costs, say getting rid of the fat in City Hall, as mentioned in prior posts.
- 10K
I'm with you on the earnings tax.realclear wrote:The problem is not the amount of the earnings tax. The problem is simply that the earnings tax exists. Even if it were lowered to 0.10% people would still complain about it. It is a clear disincentive to doing business in the city, and it was created at a time when most people worked downtown. Now jobs are spread across the metro, and STL City needs to compete with the surrounding region to attract talent and jobs. To stay competitive, the earnings tax needs to go.
Hopefully the leaders in St. Louis and Kansas City can try to make up for the revenue. One suggestion that I have liked is the land value tax based on location, not on improvements to the property. Add to that an "abandoned property/vacant land/surface parking lot" tax to kick some of these landowners in the pants and get them to start building.
One of the common excuses for maintaining the earnings tax is that 1% is a pittance, but that is 1% percent more that you don't have to pay in St. Louis County. 1% may not seem like much money, but the fact that this debate keeps coming up proves that it is an undeniable sticking point.
For example, say you have are a CEO of a business with 1000 employees and you are thinking of relocating from out of town to the St. Louis metro. You are measuring the pros and cons of the city v. the county, and you start asking your employees what they think. I am willing to bet that one of the biggest gripes with moving into the city would be giving up that 1%. If you make $100,000+ per year and you pay the earnings tax, that is $1,000. That's a lot of money for most people, and worth sending a quick email to the boss explaining that you rather locate to the County to avoid paying the tax. Now, as the boss, you have hundreds of employees telling you they don't want to pay that 1%.
Additionally, as the boss, it is possible that you make millions of dollars per year. For you and the rest of your high earning, decision making board of directors/executive committee, the earnings tax means you could lose tens of thousands of dollars per year.
All other things being equal, where would you move?
Finally, as to trash, and I may be ignorant on this point, but why doesn't everyone just pay for their own trash service? Seems like an easy thing to cut from the budget.
I will say though that if everyone had to pay for trash pick up, it could be a disaster.
- 42
I'll post this if no one else will: http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/s ... enDocument
Economic impact of earnings taxes in St. Louis and Kansas City are misconstrued.
By Rob Ryan
01/28/2010
The Show-Me Institute's criticisms of the earnings tax have hammered a central theme: the tax is responsible for income, employment, and population declines in the cities and states that use them. Evidence, however, does not actually support these claims.
Now that the organization's founder, Rex Sinquefield, is pushing a ballot initiative in Jefferson City that seeks to abolish both St. Louis' and Kansas City's earnings taxes, questions about the research methodologies behind the basis for his organization's claims should be raised.
In their guest commentary criticizing the earnings tax in the Aug. 5, 2009, edition of the Post-Dispatch, the Show-Me Institute's Joseph Haslag and Alex Schulte attributed a 1 percent drop in Missouri's share of the St. Louis metropolitan area's employment between 1998 and 2006 to St. Louis City's earnings tax.
The year 1998 seems an arbitrary baseline since Missouri's earnings tax dates to 1947, and 1969 was the first year for which employment data is easily available.
As it turns out, Missouri's share of employment in metropolitan St. Louis had increased by 1.7 percent since 1969, even as its share of population has shrunk. It is true that Missouri's share of metropolitan Kansas City's employment has decreased by 2 percent since 1998, which follows a drop of 16 percent since 1969. But what's unclear is how Kansas City's and St. Louis' earnings taxes are making employers choose Kansas and Illinois over earnings tax-free metropolitan counties in Missouri, including Lafayette, Ray and St. Louis County, all of which experienced individual drops in their shares of metropolitan employment between 1998 and 2006.
A Post-Dispatch editorial following Haslag and Schulte's commentary was adept to point out two high-growth cities that levy earnings taxes. There are many reasons why New York and Portland grew when and how they did, and it would be unreasonable to attribute that growth to their use of an earnings tax. Just as we cannot attribute growth to one particular tax, it is just as arbitrary to blame that tax for decline. But this shaky logic is exactly what is behind the findings of Show-Me Institute reports criticizing the tax since 2006.
These findings drawn from Haslag's models are classic examples of correlation passed off as causation. His research analyzes 24 cities levying some type of earnings tax to predict declines in employment and income.
The fact is that 22 of the 24 cities with earnings taxes are a homogeneous group of formerly industrial Rust Belt cities that includes Detroit and Cleveland along with St. Louis and Kansas City. In addition to earnings taxes, these cities share similar economic and political histories. They owe their declines to a national shift away from manufacturing and aging housing stock, among other reasons.
To be sure, the lack of an earnings tax in Milwaukee, Memphis and Washington, D.C., didn't stop their shares of total metropolitan population from declining nearly as fast or faster than St. Louis' or Kansas City's in the 1990s.
Additionally, the cities without earnings taxes included in Haslag's models are incomparable to St. Louis and Kansas City. Cities like Phoenix, Charlotte, and Springfield, Mo., never were heavily invested in the types of manufacturing industries that have left Rust Belt cities. And because of the relative youth of these regions, new suburbs did not pop up and incorporate as separate municipalities; instead, the central cities annexed new development and kept the wealth.
This is why Springfield stretches over 10 more square miles than St. Louis while it has half the population. Unlike St. Louis and Kansas City, these cities are not in competition with their suburbs; the suburbs are the city. Haslag's models effectively obscure these important similarities and differences between cities.
The Show-Me Institute is correct that taxes can limit growth. But it is wrong to assume that the earnings tax does more to push people from central cities than a steady stream of subsidies does to pull them to the suburbs. A more careful critique of the effects of government intervention should also consider the slew of housing subsidies that followed World War II and allocations of highway and infrastructure funds that favor suburbs over central cities.
Missouri's two largest cities need innovative ideas to spur growth. A land value tax, which would tax the land but not the structures or improvements, is a favorite of free-marketers but unproven and unlikely to cover the budget gaps that would be left in earnings taxes' places.
Although they should be commended for trying, the Show-Me Institute's ideas simply do not check out.
Rob Ryan is a research associate with the Office for Community and Social Research at St. Louis University.
Economic impact of earnings taxes in St. Louis and Kansas City are misconstrued.
By Rob Ryan
01/28/2010
The Show-Me Institute's criticisms of the earnings tax have hammered a central theme: the tax is responsible for income, employment, and population declines in the cities and states that use them. Evidence, however, does not actually support these claims.
Now that the organization's founder, Rex Sinquefield, is pushing a ballot initiative in Jefferson City that seeks to abolish both St. Louis' and Kansas City's earnings taxes, questions about the research methodologies behind the basis for his organization's claims should be raised.
In their guest commentary criticizing the earnings tax in the Aug. 5, 2009, edition of the Post-Dispatch, the Show-Me Institute's Joseph Haslag and Alex Schulte attributed a 1 percent drop in Missouri's share of the St. Louis metropolitan area's employment between 1998 and 2006 to St. Louis City's earnings tax.
The year 1998 seems an arbitrary baseline since Missouri's earnings tax dates to 1947, and 1969 was the first year for which employment data is easily available.
As it turns out, Missouri's share of employment in metropolitan St. Louis had increased by 1.7 percent since 1969, even as its share of population has shrunk. It is true that Missouri's share of metropolitan Kansas City's employment has decreased by 2 percent since 1998, which follows a drop of 16 percent since 1969. But what's unclear is how Kansas City's and St. Louis' earnings taxes are making employers choose Kansas and Illinois over earnings tax-free metropolitan counties in Missouri, including Lafayette, Ray and St. Louis County, all of which experienced individual drops in their shares of metropolitan employment between 1998 and 2006.
A Post-Dispatch editorial following Haslag and Schulte's commentary was adept to point out two high-growth cities that levy earnings taxes. There are many reasons why New York and Portland grew when and how they did, and it would be unreasonable to attribute that growth to their use of an earnings tax. Just as we cannot attribute growth to one particular tax, it is just as arbitrary to blame that tax for decline. But this shaky logic is exactly what is behind the findings of Show-Me Institute reports criticizing the tax since 2006.
These findings drawn from Haslag's models are classic examples of correlation passed off as causation. His research analyzes 24 cities levying some type of earnings tax to predict declines in employment and income.
The fact is that 22 of the 24 cities with earnings taxes are a homogeneous group of formerly industrial Rust Belt cities that includes Detroit and Cleveland along with St. Louis and Kansas City. In addition to earnings taxes, these cities share similar economic and political histories. They owe their declines to a national shift away from manufacturing and aging housing stock, among other reasons.
To be sure, the lack of an earnings tax in Milwaukee, Memphis and Washington, D.C., didn't stop their shares of total metropolitan population from declining nearly as fast or faster than St. Louis' or Kansas City's in the 1990s.
Additionally, the cities without earnings taxes included in Haslag's models are incomparable to St. Louis and Kansas City. Cities like Phoenix, Charlotte, and Springfield, Mo., never were heavily invested in the types of manufacturing industries that have left Rust Belt cities. And because of the relative youth of these regions, new suburbs did not pop up and incorporate as separate municipalities; instead, the central cities annexed new development and kept the wealth.
This is why Springfield stretches over 10 more square miles than St. Louis while it has half the population. Unlike St. Louis and Kansas City, these cities are not in competition with their suburbs; the suburbs are the city. Haslag's models effectively obscure these important similarities and differences between cities.
The Show-Me Institute is correct that taxes can limit growth. But it is wrong to assume that the earnings tax does more to push people from central cities than a steady stream of subsidies does to pull them to the suburbs. A more careful critique of the effects of government intervention should also consider the slew of housing subsidies that followed World War II and allocations of highway and infrastructure funds that favor suburbs over central cities.
Missouri's two largest cities need innovative ideas to spur growth. A land value tax, which would tax the land but not the structures or improvements, is a favorite of free-marketers but unproven and unlikely to cover the budget gaps that would be left in earnings taxes' places.
Although they should be commended for trying, the Show-Me Institute's ideas simply do not check out.
Rob Ryan is a research associate with the Office for Community and Social Research at St. Louis University.
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Anti-earnings tax effort submits truckload of signatures — 210,000 names
By Jake Wagman
Digg Yahoo! Del.icio.us Facebook Reddit Drudge Google Fark Stumble It! Supporters of a ballot initiative that could phase out the earnings tax in St. Louis and Kansas City submitted more than 200,000 signatures today — ahead of the deadline and well beyond the number of names required to secure ballot access.
The effort, funded by wealthy free market advocate Rex Sinquefield, had until this weekend to submit at least 95,000 signature to the Missouri Secretary of State’s office.
This morning, the group rented a truck to drop off 104 boxes of petitions, carrying some 210,00 signatures.
It’s not secret how the group scored so many names: Sinquefield paid $575,757 to a professional signature gathering firm, a total that represents more than $2.50 a name.
More Here
http://tinyurl.com/2enszkn
By Jake Wagman
Digg Yahoo! Del.icio.us Facebook Reddit Drudge Google Fark Stumble It! Supporters of a ballot initiative that could phase out the earnings tax in St. Louis and Kansas City submitted more than 200,000 signatures today — ahead of the deadline and well beyond the number of names required to secure ballot access.
The effort, funded by wealthy free market advocate Rex Sinquefield, had until this weekend to submit at least 95,000 signature to the Missouri Secretary of State’s office.
This morning, the group rented a truck to drop off 104 boxes of petitions, carrying some 210,00 signatures.
It’s not secret how the group scored so many names: Sinquefield paid $575,757 to a professional signature gathering firm, a total that represents more than $2.50 a name.
More Here
http://tinyurl.com/2enszkn
- 11K
Which one would be easier?
1) asking people to sign a petition saying they don't like to pay taxes
2) asking people to sign a petition saying that they like cookies
1) asking people to sign a petition saying they don't like to pay taxes
2) asking people to sign a petition saying that they like cookies
- 8,919
^ too true. 
I see it playing out like this.
The state votes to eliminate the tax. It then goes to the local muni where it is defeated on the sole reasoning that inadequate replacement funds can be located. Rex and the state lose millions.
I think it's great that Rex feels strongly enough about improving the region that he's willing to put up large amounts of his own cheddar to help eliminate the tax. Let's hope a fair and adequate alternate source of funding can be found so there will be one less thing in this region to b**** about.
I see it playing out like this.
The state votes to eliminate the tax. It then goes to the local muni where it is defeated on the sole reasoning that inadequate replacement funds can be located. Rex and the state lose millions.
I think it's great that Rex feels strongly enough about improving the region that he's willing to put up large amounts of his own cheddar to help eliminate the tax. Let's hope a fair and adequate alternate source of funding can be found so there will be one less thing in this region to b**** about.
- 11K
^ I was just reading something about "push button issues" (an issue that "pushes people's buttons). Whether public or private they are over emphasized. Basically, the idea is that you eliminate those issues and only then can you address other items. It's tempting to think that people will always have something to b**** about, but what they're b*tching about does matter. Anyway, maybe the way forward is to address issues like the earnings tax, simply as a "push button issue."
- 712
Full bio piece on Rex came out today,
Singuefield not discouraged with return on his political investments
Singuefield not discouraged with return on his political investments
- 6,775
I wouldn't count on this.Moorlander wrote:^ too true.
I see it playing out like this.
The state votes to eliminate the tax. It then goes to the local muni where it is defeated on the sole reasoning that inadequate replacement funds can be located. Rex and the state lose millions.
- 6,775
Nothing. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it passed.Alex Ihnen wrote:^ What would you count on?
- 11K
The Central Scrutinizer wrote:Nothing.Alex Ihnen wrote:^ What would you count on?
