Memphis Mayor Paul Young has now released his $897 million budget proposal. When compared quickly to some comparable cities, it suggests that Memphis spends significantly less per capita than them. I’ll be doing additional research in the future about comparative budgets; however, a few years ago, I did a comparison of the budgets of city services with other cities and except for police, the services were funded at much lower rates. In addition, the cities likely benefit significantly from funding from state income tax. In addition, these cities are in state with income taxes and their budgets significantly benefit from them.
Note: If any of these cities funded schools or included capital funding in their operating budgets, I deleted those amounts since Memphis’ budget does not include them.
$897 million
$1,468.30 per capita
Baltimore:
$3.9 billion
$6,691.13
Birmingham:
$900 million
$4,583.50 per capita
New Orleans:
$1.59 billion
$4,512.40 per capita
Detroit:
$2.9 billion
$4,510.94 per capita
Knoxville:
$499 million
$2,464.60 per capita
So what? What are we supposed to glean from this information? What tax rate would be have to impose to match these per capita funding levels and what would it bring us? Do these cities also fund their school systems? Is there also an equivalent – or higher in our case, County tax? All this chart does is raise more questions than provide answers.
Tom, give us some rationale as to why this number is so low compared to other cities, and what does that mean for the average Memphians?
I’m also baffled. Our per capita is too low.
I’ll be doing additional research in the future about comparative budgets; however, a few years ago, I did a comparison of the budgets of Memphis services with some comparable cities and except for police, the services were funded at much lower rates. In addition, the cities likely benefit significantly from funding from state income tax.
Note: If any of these cities funded schools or included capital funding in their operating budgets, I deleted those amounts for the comparison since Memphis’ budget does not include them.