Tax

This is not the kind of kick envisioned when Major League Soccer decided to locate its newest franchise in the City of Chester. Desperately seeking revenue, Chester has informed Philadelphia Union officials that it is considering a 10 percent tax on ticket sales and a 20 percent charge for parking at PP&L Park, the team's home. The fees could add as much as $2 million to city coffers, but team owners see a "banana kick," a soccer term for a deceptive shot designed to curve behind a goalie.

In the first few years of the last decade, a lot of assumptions were made about aging baby boomers, their parents, their children, and their housing needs. Boomers would begin downsizing as soon as the children flew the coop, starting at about 55. Boomers would move to communities filled with their own kind. Elderly parents would be accommodated in a casita — a part of the house — until they needed continuing care. The casita would then be converted to a crafts room.

Ed Rendell's monuments - stadiums for wealthy sports-team owners, convention centers, and the tax-advantaged hotels that feed off them, hundreds of private developments built with government grants - will outlast his political career when he steps down from Pennsylvania's top job this winter. So will the debts he laid on taxpayers. Pennsylvania state debt rose from $6.1 billion to $9.2 billion in Rendell's eight years in Harrisburg, his last budget shows. Borrowing grew at more than double the rate of inflation.

TRENTON - Tax collections in New Jersey are running $230 million behind Gov. Christie's projections after April revenue came up short, according to a state Treasury report released Tuesday. If the trend continues, Christie and lawmakers may have to revise their plans to cut taxes, or they may have to find other places to trim the budget. New Jersey's economy is growing, but revenue in April - when the state brings in a large haul of its income and corporate tax collection - lagged in New Jersey, down from $3.32 billion last year to $3.26 billion this year, according to the Treasury report.

With a first-year record like Gov. Corbett's, it's a good thing he still has three more years to go. Or maybe not. Another three years could give Corbett time to make some progress, at least, toward pressing issues facing the state - like fixing roads and bridges, or making natural-gas drillers pay their fair share. There even may be time to do something about handgun violence that tragically ends hundreds of Pennsylvanians' lives annually (were the governor not such a gun-rights stalwart)

  There's budget trouble in Medford, an affluent Norman Rockwell suburb with two newly renovated fire halls, respected schools, and a variety of lush parks. Despite the recent economic turmoil and the township's apparently insatiable demand for amenities, its tax rate stayed flat from 2006 to 2010 and went up only slightly last year. And that is precisely why the Burlington County community now faces a financial emergency, say leaders of the five-member, all-Republican Town Council and a chorus of budget experts.

More than 100 mostly boisterous residents turned out last night, some to support the mayor's plan to decrease the tax rate by 2 cents and others who supported the council's even bigger giveback. Under the Township Council's spending plan, taxes this year would fall by 4 cents per $100 of assessed property value. That amounts to a savings of about $48 for the owner of a home assessed at $120,000, the township average. Mayor Gerald Luongo had submitted a spending plan of $23,457,627 that allowed a tax-rate decrease of 2 cents.

Facing what some see as the most dire funding crisis in decades, school districts across the region are proposing cuts that could drastically reshape their programs and communities. In district after district, officials have proposed budgets notable for what's missing: busing, kindergarten, athletics, librarians, languages, gym classes. Thousands of area school employees are likely to lose jobs, even as taxes in their districts rise. "This is unlike anything we've seen in the last 50 years," said Lou DeVlieger, superintendent of Upper Darby School District, which plans to cut 47 jobs, draw $4 million from reserves, and raise taxes 2.7 percent.

MAYOR NUTTER is constantly crying poor and trying to charge taxpayers more fees or provide fewer services. His new plan is to charge a weekly trash fee to help the city raise needed funds. Then, in the same day's paper is an article on Nutter appointing a former city official to a position heading the Office of Economic Opportunity. In plain English, this position is aimed at getting 25 percent of all city contracts to go to minority- or female-owned businesses. But the real kicker is that her salary will be $135,000.

For a country that's short of cash and repelled by Wall Street greed, this proposal sounds like a winner: Tax the sale of stocks and bonds. At a penny for every $2 worth of securities, such a levy would bring in about $12 billion a year. And it would fall most heavily on the fast-buck artists who buy and sell securities for speculative gain, not long-term investment. Or so the pitch goes. Unfortunately, even though the tax sounds small, it probably would jolt financial markets.

Q. I think electric cars are the wave of the future. As soon as I read that [GM's Volt is available in all states], I contacted a nearby Chevy dealer who has been a lifelong friend to get on the list to buy one. He assured me that I'd be among his first 50. The price will be about $40,000. The demand is apparently so great that the dealer will be able to demand full sticker price for some time to come, so I got no price break. However, he assured me that the price hit will be softened by a federal income-tax credit.

In a councilmanic showdown, Bill Green and Wilson Goode Jr. squared off Thursday over Mayor Nutter's plan to revamp the property-tax system — a source of much consternation and debate in City Hall recently. No doubt, once homes are assessed and taxed at their true market value, there will be winners and losers. Some homeowners will see drastic increases; many will get a tax break. In a series of speeches capping Thursday's City Council meeting, Goode emphasized that there are 250,000 houses at or below the city's median value of $120,000.

TRENTON — The Christie administration backtracked Wednesday on its plan to borrow less in 2013 to pay for transportation infrastructure improvements. It hopes to shift $260 million originally intended for transportation spending into the state's general fund, which would help facilitate Gov. Christie's top priority in the coming fiscal year: implementing a 10 percent income-tax cut. The state would then borrow $260 million to replace that cash in the annual $1.6 billion transportation capital fund, a practice Christie previously criticized, State Treasurer Andrew P. Sidamon-Eristoff said Wednesday.

In April, the Nutter administration began providing Council members with a first glimpse at the potential winners and losers from the shift to a property tax system based on the true market value of homes. The data, which was shared with The Inquirer on Friday, shows some results that confound conventional thinking and demonstrate - yet again - the haphazard unfairness of the current tax system. Not surprisingly, wealthy neighborhoods like Rittenhouse Square and University City are likely to pay more, and some poorer areas like Kingsessing and Kensington could see dramatic reductions.

A Narberth man who owned and operated a company that processed dental claims for labor union health and welfare funds was convicted by a federal jury Tuesday of willfully filing false tax returns from 1999 through 2002. Jonathon Felix, 51, who owned and operated United Professional Plans, Inc., which received management fees on a per claim or per person basis to process claims and resolve disputes between labor union members and dental providers. Among the unions UPPI worked for was District Council 33 of AFSCME, which represents the city of Philadelphia's blue-collar workers.

Councilman Bill Green is continuing to push the Nutter administration on the potential for the mayor's proposed market-value property-tax system to be a tax windfall for commercial property owners. Green on Monday released a spreadsheet that predicts the impact of Nutter's tax proposal, known as the Actual Value Initiative. Based on Green's calculations, the shift to AVI could move $200 million to $300 million in overall tax burden from commercial to residential taxpayers. Green said this could happen because commercial properties are now more accurately assessed than residential properties, which are collectively assessed well below their market values.

When two New Jersey towns asked voters to approve a property-tax hike last month, Gov. Christie scorned them. The state's other 564 municipalities didn't seek permission to exceed the 2 percent cap on tax increases. Didn't Medford and Lawrence Townships know how to cut spending? But Christie was mum a few days later when his administration quietly gave Chesterfield the go-ahead to raise municipal taxes a whopping 458 percent. The average tax bill in the tiny rural Burlington County community will jump nearly $1,000.

Fewer American teenagers and young adults are lighting up as cigarette taxes that have broken the $3-a-pack threshold in some states make smoking too costly, according to the latest National Survey on Drug Use and Health. Daily smoking, the leading cause of preventable illness and death in the United States, fell to 15.8 percent in 2010 among young adults 18 to 25, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration said in a report. That share was down from 20.4 percent in 2004.

With five locations, in Northeast Philadelphia, Ridley Township, Bensalem, Clementon and Turnersville, Nifty Fifty's restaurants are nostalgia-themed throwbacks to the glory days of sock hops and drugstore-fountain milkshakes. "Not just another restaurant," the company touts on its website, "but a way of life. " Federal prosecutors, in a criminal case filed Wednesday, say that way of life included a long-running scheme by the company's owners and top managers to evade more than $2.2 million in federal employment and personal income taxes by skimming mountains of cash from the 26-year-old chain.

"WATCH US do it fresh," is how the owners of the local restaurant chain Nifty Fifty's pitch customers on the chain's website. A bit too fresh for Uncle Sam, apparently. The U.S. attorney in Philadelphia have charged two owners and three managers of the chain — which includes five locations in southeastern Pennsylvania and South Jersey — with tax evasion for allegedly masterminding a long-running scheme to evade millions of dollars in personal and employment taxes. Those charged Wednesday include: Robert Mattei, 73, of Delray Beach, Fla.; Leo McGlynn, 52, of Swarthmore; Joseph Donnelly, 49, and Brian Welsh, 48, both of Springfield, Delaware County; and Elena Ruiz, 46, of Drexel Hill.