Part 3 of 8 in How Philly Taxes You

Mayor Parker recently announced that she's cutting our wage and earnings tax (i.e., the city's income tax, which sits on top of federal and state taxes), from 3.75% to 3.74%, a cut of 0.01%.

What a joke.

Look, if you make $50,000 a year, that 0.01% is worth $5 to you. Not enough for a Happy Meal. If you make $100,000, it saves you $10 — enough for a Happy Meal, but not enough for a Big Mac meal.

Oh, and the grand "vision" is to cut this tax by 0.05% by 2030, meaning most Philly families will save between $25-50/year... By comparison, inflation will eat up about $5000 of a $50,000 family's income in 2030. So the tax reduces your family's loss from $5000 to $4975. I'm at a loss for words.

This is just offensive. City Hall is playing with our minds, hoping we did not do the math - I at least did. The W&E tax generates $1.9 billion a year for the city. A 0.01% cut costs about $5 million against a $7 billion budget. These are not rounding errors. These are the numbers that matter.

Marginal changes drive marginal results. What the actual hell, make real changes. Improve my services. Cut my taxes. Do anything except twiddle around on the fourth decimal place.

The school district faces a $300 million structural deficit. The pension obligation is $1.5 billion a year and nobody is touching it. Property tax assessments are a joke — if you know how to appeal, you pay less. If you do not know to appeal, you do not pay less. That is not a tax system. That is a wealth transfer from people who follow the rules to people who can afford lawyers.

None of that seems to be happening. The real revenue moves continue to be regressive ones—a proposed $1/ride rideshare surcharge that falls on working-class riders (covered in my piece on the regressive-revenue machine), and quietly structured surcharges on cigarettes that pass through the School District as a workaround for state preemption. The wage-tax nickel meanwhile generates headlines for the Mayor.