Death of Public Transportation

[drjeff]

Ahh yes. Conflicting directions, simultaneously proposed. Good stuff.


Cities with a city income tax are harder to bring back.

Getting businesses, business professionals, and laborers to want to work here just becomes 1% harder [plus the accounting fees].

And that's on top of the single worst schools in the country with nearly the highest cost.

It's ridiculous to even suggest more taxes at this point. The city needs to find a way to use the money they have now 2-3 times as efficiently.


For reference,

Buffalo N.Y. spends $568 million on a pop of 884,000. Or $642 per person.

Miami spends $9.3 billion on 6.265 million people, or $1,484 per person.

Virginia Beach spends $2.5 billion on 1.488 million people. Or $1,680 per person.

Whereas Detroit's budget equals $3,952 per person.

That's 2.35 times as much as VA Beach spends, 2.66 times as much as Miami and 6 times as much as Buffalo N.Y.

Your population numbers are way, way off.
The population of Buffalo is 276,000
The population of Virginia Beach is 450,000, not anything close to 1.5 million
The population of Miami, FL is 440,000

You are apparently counting the huge metro areas and not the actual cities.

[Jason]

Your population numbers are way, way off.
The population of Buffalo is 276,000
The population of Virginia Beach is 450,000, not anything close to 1.5 million
The population of Miami, FL is 440,000

You are apparently counting the huge metro areas and not the actual cities.

Those numbers also don't account for the way different areas have different levels of government handling different responsibilities. Buffalo has a regional transit agency which covers both public transit and the airports. Detroit also does water/sewage, while Buffalo's is in a separate agency. Detroit also does public housing, and some public health stuff, which it also looks like Buffalo does separately. Looking through Detroit's budget, it looks like almost half the spending is from things that would be done at the county or state level, or in separate agencies, in other cities.

Even the income tax issue he brought up isn't really the whole story. Yes it matters, because you have two places right next to each other where in one you pay less income tax [[although in reality people tend to start with where they want to be, and then go to their most favored place they can afford, not the other way around). But if the discussion is about the tax burden, then it's misleading, because while city residents pay 2.4%, the state income tax is only 4.25%, and 6.65% is still completely in line with other states. Going back to my point in the previous paragraph, if Michigan simply had a 6.65% income tax and sent back 2.4% back to the municipalities in the form of revenue sharing, people would say Detroit had "lower taxes" even though in reality it didn't.