Dave Davies Discovers What I Learned Two Weeks Ago.
By Chris Satullo’s definition, it appears dave davies is a cynic:
HAVE YOU PLAYED the Humpty-Dumpty Game yet?
You have one more chance tonight, at the Pinn Memorial Baptist Church, in West Philadelphia.
This is the exercise where Mayor Nutter’s top people put briefing materials in your hand and ask you to put the broken pieces of Philadelphia’s finances back together again. Seriously.
I played Thursday in Germantown, where 500 people crowded into the Pickett School gym….
The game, while useful, is inevitably rigged. All the choices presented involved cutting services or gouging someone for more revenue. None involved eliminating waste or improving productivity.
As my colleague Catherine Lucey pointed out in Friday’s newspaper, potential savings from union contracts next year might reduce the need for service cuts. Organizers said that those choices weren’t included because you can’t count on them….
This, of course, is EXACTLY what I have been saying since the original “forum”. And while I’m glad Davies is covering this (I feel sorry for the folks at WHYY, who have to play at objectively covering an event their boss is running) and speaking his mind, I cannot help but notice his column arrives at the same conclusions I made much earlier this month.
Of course the process is rigged. Of course the process is built to cut services and gouge people on their taxes. But why doesn’t Davies point out that at the same time the public is participating in this sham, the Mayor has been meeting with business leaders to tell them not to worry, that THEIR taxes won’t go up.
On a related note, when is someone going to bring up the gross receipts tax, which Stan Shapiro from One Philadelphia outlined at a recent Coalition to Save the Libraries meeting? Here’s an excerpt from a handout Stan printed up:
Rolling back the GRT to its 2003 rate would raise $36 million per year, even while exempting small businesses entirely from the tax.
The Gross Receipts Tax is one part of the Business Privilege Tax. It raises approximately $100 million per year.
The Gross Receipts Tax is essentially a tax on business sales. It has been fiercely attacked by the Chamber of Commerce, because it taxes businesses whether they make a profit or not, something that is said to be particularly harmful to small, neighborhood businesses. Due to the Chamber’s pressure, the tax has been reduced by almost 2/3 since it reached its highest level in 1988 of .0039….
But here’s the dirty little secret of the gross receipts tax. Most of it actually falls on relatively big companies with sales into the City of more than $500,000. They pay about 90% of all the revenue raised by the tax. And the part of the secret that the Chamber of Commerce really doesn’t want you to know, is that a major portion of the tax is paid by businesses that are not located in the City. That’s right, they may be located in Conshohocken, or they may be located in San Diego, but if they sell products within the City of Philadelphia they pay, or are supposed to pay, the GRT on their sales here….
So here’s how we can make the tax more fair, and raise another $36 million from it.
First exempt the first $500,000 of sales from the base that is subject to the tax. So if your sales are $500,000 or less, you would pay no tax. And if your sales are greater than $500,000 you would start paying the tax only when your sales get to $500,001. In that case you would pay the tax on only $1. Exempting $500,000 from tax would eliminate liability for about 85% of all businesses currently paying the tax.
When do we get to talk about THAT? when do we talk about Payment in Lieu of Taxes for giant nonprofits like Penn and PECO? when do we talk about Land value Taxation, which I hear has a lot of peromise for raising revenue without raping residents?
Oh that’s right: cuts and unacceptable tax hikes only. Why make the wealthy pay their share, when there are poor people and children (the mayor’s favorite whipping boys) to shoulder the burden? Why should the head of Comcast pay more, when a poor kid’s pool will cover the amount just as well? Why reform the drug laws and squeeze some revenue out of potheads, when you can make sure a young kid ends up in prison, giving the Mayor’s re-entry program something to do?
Right? Isn’t that right?
Philadelphia isn’t the place that loves you back: it’s the place where the Mayor kicks the most vulnerable people when they’re down to begin with. All class, that guy. A real class act. One thing for the upper class, and nothing for the lower classes.
