At Odds with Progress: An Analysis of Minnesota's Municipal Tax Legislation, Metro-Area Fiscal Control, and the Taxpayer's Income Conundrum, 2003-2012

Abstract

In recent decades, cities in the Twin Cities Metro Area have been struggling to balance their budgets to meet their taxpayer’s demand for services. Some state legislators and scholars have long presumed that these problems are the product of the revenue-generating inequalities between individual cities, but this study argues that the problems cities face in generating tax revenues are the product of an increasingly unequal distribution of income between taxpayers.