Income Taxes and Your City's Post-Recession Economy

Many Northeast Ohio cities, like their residents, are slowly recovering from the Great Recession.

Cities raise money primarily through income taxes, permits, fees and through state support. That money pays for services you use — fire and police departments, roads, snow removal, garbage collection — along with additional services you’ve come to expect, such as senior centers, swimming pools, community festivals and Fourth of July fireworks.
 
There are three kinds of income taxes:

• Withholdings, which are taken out of employee paychecks
• Net profit tax, which businesses pay on their earnings, and
• Individual income tax, which residents who work outside a city pay. (This varies based on the towns where you live and work, what the income tax rate is and what credit is available between the two towns.)

Simply put, cities make money when their residents make money. And both cities and their residents have suffered the past few years.

Patch reviewed income tax revenue from all 18 Northeast Ohio Patch communities. We compared each city’s collections from 2008 to 2012 to get a sense of how local communities have weathered the storm.

Click on the links below to read more:

 
Editor’s Note: In this series, Patch gauges the recovery of 18 Ohio communities based on income tax receipts since the Great Recession. Find their individual stories Monday on Patch's Ohio news sites.