It is my duty as a taxpayer to present the other side of a frothy argument. Sorry.
A condescending attitude is not appropriate here.
First, if Minneapolis residents pay more income and sales taxes in 2003 than they did in 2001, we would be quite an anomaly. Tax collections have dropped through the floor over the past two years.
I'll grant that 2003 numbers might be lower, but I'm betting they will be higher than the 2001 numbers I quoted. That was my personal opinion on the matter.
Regardless, the numbers were not meant to be exact but to be order of magnitude. The fact is, Minneapolis pays more tax revenue to the state per capita than perhaps all other communities and counties in the state, certainly on an equal sample-size basis. Minneapolis also generates more commerce and more taxable income per capita than most (if not all) other communities in the state. That's the relevant issue here.
Second, the people who can and do pay income and sales taxes will continue to do so - no matter where they live within Minnesota. In other words, if the property taxes in Minneapolis drive taxpayers and businesses to the suburbs, the State loses NOTHING.
Wrong. If Minneapolis declines, and that commerce and those residents go elsewhere, there is zero guarantee they will go someplace else in Minnesota or that they will continue to earn and spend at the same rate they did in Minneapolis. They may well leave the state, earn less or spend less.
A further fatal flaw in your statement is the assumption that those taxes are all paid by people who live in Minnesota and who would simply shop in Edina instead. Minneapolis hosts 12 million visitors per year, and a significant number of them are out-of-state visitors to conventions, conferences, sporting events and so forth. If they stopped coming, it's unlikely they would show up to spend money in the fuzzy-math suburbs. They would instead choose to go to Milwaukee, Omaha, Kansas City, Chicago, Denver, etc.
Minneapolis must compete with other cities. The cities that deliver the highest quality services and amenities at the most reasonable cost win.
I'm sure Minneapolis can easily compete -- just as long as we can level the playing field. Minneapolis has been supporting the spoiled-rotten suburban-sprawl lifestyle of the Metro area for 50+ years now.
Your naive zero-sum viewpoint that it's all about competition is also extremely harmful to the state as a whole. The Minnesota Miracle, which tremendously improved the economic, cultural and educational opportunities in Minnesota for everyone, even the insulated people living in North Oaks, was a result of spreading the wealth, of inter-community cooperation designed by the state, and not the result of competition between cities.
Your statement smells like the "cake eater" mentality, to mix metaphors. That idea is that the wealthy can live in their high-quality service and amenities communities at a reasonable cost, pushing much of the true costs off onto the state and other communites, and that if the surrounding communites are poor with low quality services and high crime, well that's just too bad -- they weren't competitive enough. In reality, the result is the criminals from those other communites break into the homes in the wealthy community. Yes, that's meant to symbolic or representative, not literal (except in the extreme). It is meant to illustrate that a society sinks or swims together, not by beating each other into win/loss scenarious.
Quite frankly, I don't know if Minneapolis is an economic engine or an economic Shop Vac. What I do know is that it's a lot cheaper to live in North Oaks - at least for now.
I agree -- you don't know if Minneapolis is an economic engine. Sure, it's cheaper -- for you -- to live in North Oaks, thanks to 50 years of subsidizing suburban sprawl.
You may have complaints about how efficiently Minneapolis delivers services, and I've got a litany of them, too. But the state should be encouraging (carrot), cajoling (stick) and where necessary (e.g. the pension problems) forcing the city to clean up it's mess, versus directly adding to the problem via economic punishment.
That's especially true when it's being used to clean up the state's own fiscal mess, a result of their own "inefficiency" and legislative inaction by the very people leading the attack on Minneapolis today. We've known the economic cycle was turning down for 3 full years now. Where we're those budget hawks back then?
Chris Johnson Fulton
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