[ back ]
Tax collecting gets burdensome
(by Dave Lange - August 02, 2012)
Tax collecting gets burdensome
This probably is perfect logic for financial wizards. But a working stiff like myself is a bit confused by a change in the city of Solon municipal income-tax ordinance.
Based on Finance Director Dennis Kennedy’s expert advice regarding the recent opening of the Horseshoe Casino in downtown Cleveland, Solon City Council is about to raise the threshold for collecting income taxes from residents on gambling winnings from $2,000 to $250,000. As I understand it, if a resident won $2,001 from a one-armed bandit at the Seneca Allegany Casino in Salamanca, N.Y., last month, the city would take its 2 percent cut. But if that same resident were to win $249,999 on the craps table at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh next month, the city wouldn’t take a dime of it.
The reason being, as Mr. Kennedy explained it, is that, with new casinos opening in Ohio, a lot more residents will be winning big money, and, well, why should the city bother with collecting more taxes from winners?
The same logic applies to lottery sweepstakes, which will be included in the increased winnings threshold, even though there’s no reason to believe more Solon residents will be winning the lottery.
“With the advent of casino gambling in Ohio, the proliferation of lower-level winnings will increase dramatically, thus complicating the administrative burden of verifying and assessing those smaller amounts,” the finance director said.
It seems that, while it wasn’t too much trouble to go after $40.02 in taxes on those $2,001 jackpots before, because there weren’t very many of them, it will be burdensome to collect $4,999.98 on $249,999 gambling prizes now, because the number of winners will be so overwhelming.
Maybe I’m becoming a conspiracy theorist about socialists residing in the White House, but it also seems more than coincidental that $250,000 is the exact same threshold being used by the president and his cronies in the U.S. Senate for raising federal income taxes from 35 percent to 39.6 percent. You never know how many job creators rolling in poker stakes will be rolling along Interstate 271 in their BMWs from Cleveland’s Public Square to hiring offices at Solon Square.
Fortunately, since the U.S. House of Representatives will not put up with this hypocritical scheme to raise taxes on the job creators, plenty of people are bound to get hired for the jobs that are sure to be created, and they will pay their fair share of municipal income taxes to Solon.
If one of them is lucky enough to land a full-time job flipping hamburgers at one of the local fast-food joints or cleaning out cages at the new pet store that city officials are anxious to bend zoning regulations for, earning the minimum wage of $7.70 an hour, he would pay about $320 in Solon income taxes over the course of a year.
Why, it would take just 15 or 16 of those full-time, minimum-wage workers to make up for the loss of income-tax collections from one of those many burdensome $249,999 winners at the casino.
Suddenly, this whole thing makes perfect sense. Income taxes are supposed to be for people who work for their money and don’t stash it away in the Cayman Islands. People who get their money without working for it needn’t be burdened by income taxes.
[ back ]
