Yet another Casualty of Income Inequality: State Budgets aka education/infrastructure
This is a particularly disturbing article, since I had just posted these two OPs a few days ago:
Why the fuck is The Fed setting the stage to bankrupt local municipalities?
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025516037
The Fed Just Imposed Financial Austerity on the States
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025525925
These two things coming to light within a few days of each other, is striking to me. I mean really. WTF is going on here? Nothing other than the steady deliberate beggaring of working people and their local communities by a handful of obscenely wealthy oligarchs, leeches who presume to be "entitled" to rape, plunder and pillage everything and everyone in sight.
Think Greece. Think Detroit. <--Our Future, brought to you by The 1%
HOW DO WE STOP THIS? ... OR HAS THE TRAIN LEFT THE STATION?
AP * 09/15/2014 12:23 am EDT Updated: 09/15/2014 11:59 am EDT
JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — A national increase in income inequality appears to be negatively affecting tax revenues in Missouri and other states, according to a new report from a credit rating agency.
The report by Standard & Poor's notes that Missouri's average annual tax revenue growth has declined sharply over recent decades. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Missouri averaged more than 9 percent annual growth. But from 2000 to 2009, it averaged just 1.8 percent growth.
Over the past several decades, household incomes have risen significantly faster for the top 1 percent of earners nationwide than for median households — a trend that economics refer to as the income gap, or income inequality.
The Standard & Poor's report examined the tax revenues in 10 states that rely heavily on income taxes, including Missouri, and 10 other states that depend more significantly on sales taxes for their revenues. "The findings from our research indicate that tax revenue growth slows as income inequality rises, regardless of a state's tax structure," said the report, written by S&P credit analysis Gabriel Petek.
In Missouri's sales-tax dependent neighbor of Tennessee, for example, the average annual tax revenue growth has declined from 9 percent in the period of the 1950s through 1970s to 3.8 percent during 2000 through 2009. Although Missouri had a sharper decline than Tennessee, the report found that the rise of income inequality generally had a stronger negative effect on the group of sales-tax-reliant states than the income-tax dependent states.
The report concludes that income inequality is an economic problem — with financial implications for states — and that states are unlikely to be able to fully offset it by changing their tax policies.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/15/inequality-state-taxes_n_5820348.html?utm_hp_ref=business
