MarketWatch
Philadelphia relies on a commuter tax to balance its budget. What does that mean in a work-from-home world?
Some public finance analysts think now is as good a time as any to rethink revenue structures that have been around for decades, in some cases.
“A lot of what needs to happen is an adjusting of the pre-pandemic tax structure to a reckoning of the post-pandemic reality, but this is a challenging time,” said Matt Fabian, a partner with Municipal Market Analytics. “We often think about what’s happening now in terms of a regular economic recession, with benchmarks for recovery. But this is more of an evolution. We don’t know what we’re going to recover to.”
Philadelphia has been gradually reducing its reliance on the wage tax for years, Waxman noted. She and other officials are all too aware that taxing workers can be a negative for employers considering setting up shop there, even as the city has tried to market itself as a less-expensive version of New York or Washington.