Workers to Bear Burden of New Metro Tax
By Eric Fruits, Ph.D.
While much of the region is stuck at home under the governor’s “stay home, stay safe” order, the Metro regional government is charging ahead with a $7 billion “T2020” transportation package focused on an expensive and unneeded light rail line. Unlike Metro’s recently passed taxes for housing services, T2020 will impose hundreds of dollars in new taxes on just about every working person in the region.
To fund its massive spending plan, Metro has settled on a new poll-driven tax: a payroll tax anticipated to cost about $250 million a year. Approximately 925,000 people work in Metro’s jurisdiction, so the payroll tax will be about $270 a year per employee. Where will that payroll tax money come from?
In most cases, the payroll tax will fall on the workers. A review of the research on payroll taxes concludes that workers tend to bear nearly all of the burden of payroll tax, even if the tax is levied on their employer: “virtually all applied incidence studies assume that both the employee share and the employer share are borne by the employee (through a fall in the net wage by the full amount of payroll tax).”