To follow the jobs loss data, cited in item below, here’s a quick update on a couple of our onerous Cuyahoga County regressive taxes and what they cost us monthly.
For your May payments, citizens & taxpayers, to support the Browns Stadium, used nearly exclusively (what 9 or 10 days a year) by the billionaire Lerner family, we paid $5,544,424 in May alone. Since switching the stadium "sin" taxes for the baseball field to the football field in August, 2005, we’ve paid a whopping $39,249,696. Always nice to help billionaires. The Lerner family pays a measily $250,000 in annual rent and the city pays its insurance bill of some $125,000.
Here’s the May breakdown: Smokers paid $1.1 million; drinkers of alcohol, $2.09 million; Beer drinkers, $1.79 million; wine and mixed beverages, only $486,480.
Smokers contributed another $1.4 million to the new Arts & Culture Tax during May. For smokers it has cost since the start of the tax in February, $24.8 million. That’s a lot of loot up in smoke.
We don’t have monthly figures for the Commissioners’ added quarter percent imposed sale tax increase for the medical mart and convention center. However, since it is expected to raise $40 million a year, the monthly bill for Cuyahoga County taxpayers is about $3.3 million each and every month of the year.
Add it all up for May and the take, or shall we say the out-of-pocket costs for taxpayers, was slightly more than $10 million.
Now how do those unemployed people pay this burden?
I guess they cut down on their driving since gasoline is so expensive.
Links:
[1] http://li326-157.members.linode.com/blog/roldo/year-1968-cleveland
[2] http://li326-157.members.linode.com/content/roldo-bartimole-0
[3] http://li326-157.members.linode.com/content/zanotti-took-gambling-trips-alternative-paper-says