Peter Vevang, in his rebuttal to my claims, makes the mistake of comparing household incomes over time. Household incomes have, in some cases, leveled off or declined slightly. However, as I pointed out in a previous post, this is more a reflection of the changing nature of households than anything else.
For the sake of argument, assume that we have a household of a man and a woman and their three children. This constitutes one household. If these
two people get divorced, their are now two households, each earning less than when they when there was just one household. The affect of this
divorce will be the median household income will have dropped. The same would occur if a child would leave the household to start his/her own household.
For information on individual income, visit the Historical Income Tables - People at http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/p54.html which reports the percent of the population at a given income over time. An examination of the data shows a trend toward increasing (inflation adjusted) income. That is, the middle class is disappearing because it is being squeezed upward! :)
Gary Hoover writes:
Too often, I think we make Minneapolis or Minneapolis taxes or services
a scapegoat when our frustrations are with much larger and more complex issues.
Can city government effectively address these issues without careful partnership with other metro suburbs, counties, and the state? If we compete and try to externalize the costs onto each other, who benefits, and who suffers?
Working within the context of a society where the State, the County, and the school district all levy taxes on us, we still find that the City of Minneapolis can minimize the negative impact of its spending (and, thus, taxes).
When I compare South St Paul, where I now live, with Minneapolis, where I lived up until a month ago, I find that Minneapolis spends, per capita, roughly 3 times as much on debt service and expenditures as does South St Paul. Its per capita debt load is also three times that of South St Paul. This implies that its property taxes are much higher than are those of South St Paul.
There is a real cost to taxes, namely, those who were taxed no longer can use that money, whether it be too fix up their home, repair their car, hire the kid down the block to mow the lawn, or to expand a business by hiring more workers.
Some of this money may be redistributed to those in need but what of the rest?
Scott McGerik South St Paul (formerly Hawthorne) http://scott.mcgerik.com/
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