This archive article is selected from The Cleveland Pages, the city's only weekly independent journal of politics and opinion on the Internet. Find out all about the Cleveland Pages here, or check out the current issue.
The Free Times, in an article no longer online, called Cleveland Pages "Spicily independent... in the best tradition of citizen-journalist."
The Cleveland Pages is a somewhat-weekly commentary on what's new and why it's all happening in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. If what you read here is upsetting, you might prefer this simple-minded happy-talk instead.
Bookmark the Cleveland Pages at http://re.cleveland.oh.us. Bookmark this issue at http://re.cleveland.oh.us/archives/19990430.html.
A Cleveland Pages archive search will be available soon... Meanwhile, skip to the flat-file archive list! And read an overview of who's putting this thing out and what it's about.
(Note: Over the following weekend, I took some time to read the RITA forms also. They're actually pretty easy to follow, but what is the deal with their Schedule EX-18? It's titled "household members under 18 years of age" and appears to be asking for the names and social security numbers of all your children for no good reason at all. What possible need could your workplace municipality have for that kind of information? It sounds like a fairly direct privacy violation. Please submit a comment below if you have more information on this; it just came to my attention now.)
I need help paying my local income taxes this year.
No, I have the cash. I mean I can't figure out how.
It's a truism that the federal income tax is an outrage of complexity; insofar as the Ohio tax calculations are based on the federal adjusted gross income, they suffer from inherited confusion. For some reason I've never found these forms particularly difficult to understand, even though over the years I've had weird combinations of W-2, Schedule C, and capital gains income as well as different itemized and non-itemized deductions.
About the hardest thing these days is properly itemizing business expenses for the Schedule C, and the pain there is merely a result of my own laziness in keeping the accounting data up to date throughout the year. Had I actually kept my fixed assets and ongoing bill payments on the system, it would have been trivially easy to chunk out the 1040 long-form in a night or two. Alas, and mea culpa, I filled out federal form 4868 yet again, for the third consecutive year, because of the boredom factor.
All whining aside, the Ohio and federal calculations are not really hard. If you have a complex business situation, divorce issues, or lots of investments, it's slightly more work, but affordable software packages provide most of the answers automatically.
But then you have the local tax forms.
The Central Collection Agency (CCA), a consortium including Cleveland and many (but not all) suburbs throughout the metropolitan area, offers the most complex and self-contradictory tax forms of all.
Their web site, at http://www.ccatax.ci.cleveland.oh.us, is one of those horrendous "optimized for Netscape and Internet Explorer at such-and-such resolution" things. But the good news is that it's fairly intelligently laid out, if you don't mind frames too much. It has a nice long list of the CCA "Rules and Regulations" but doesn't quite explain their source. On the whole, the web site is very helpful, but mostly as an alternative to the official forms.
The worst part of the CCA form is the explanation of estimated residence tax. In a city full of hourly workers and day laborers, there's something wrong with telling people to guess how much they're going to earn and dividing it by four for each quarter. What about seasonal workers, or those who have inconsistent or unpredictable earnings? What about people who get laid off unexpectedly at midyear? What happens if you take a leave? Guess what: your quarterly payments are still billed. It's a bad system explained poorly. Nobody should have to predict the future.
And what about that Schedule C? I am already extending my time to file the federal Schedule C--mostly due to the laid-back recordkeeping style I've already confessed--but CCA wants to see it with my city forms. Oh well, looks like they'll have to wait too.
What's really wrong with the local tax system is that it concentrates on what you produce and sell as a worker or business owner, and that it hits you for extra charges just for crossing municipal boundaries to earn a living. It especially penalizes city people who work in a suburb, because we get only a partial offset for the work-city taxes. For example if you live in Cleveland but work in Euclid--not so uncommon--you are going to be stuck for 2.85% to Euclid and 0.5575% to Cleveland, resulting in an effective rate of 3.4075%! That's not only a lot to pay, it's also hard to calculate. And why should you pay more just for working hard?
We should get out of the syndrome of taxing productivity anyway. Good city services, especially including transportation, tend to be reflected in land values. Wouldn't it be great to get a monthly bill for your land taxes, to be paid just like your water and electric bills... without that regressive income tax coming out of your paycheck?
This document's template was last modified on Wednesday, 09-Nov-2005 18:51:58 EST. There is a new Cleveland Pages more or less every weekend. The entire Cleveland Pages website is © 1997,1998,1999,2000,2001,2002,2003 by Mark W. Schumann, all rights reserved. Copyrights belonging to others on individual items are noted. Nobody else would take the credit or blame for these opinions anyway.
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