If you live in Charlotte, you pay the highest taxes in the state among big municipalities. By a mile.
So says a new report by the John Locke Foundation. Among the state’s largest cities, Charlotte ($2,289 per person), Chapel Hill, Wilmington, Asheville, and Mooresville had the highest local government burdens, according to the report. Compare that to Raleigh, where government takes in a mere $1901.31 per person.
It’s just more fuel for Raleigh’s meteoric rise as the premier New South city after Atlanta, a title Charlotte once securely held. Because of numbers like this, national “best places” to live, work and do business surveys that always ranked Charlotte highly a decade ago now tend to default to Raleigh with Charlotte trailing further behind … when it makes these ranking surveys at all. That’s because contrary to local popular opinion, what it costs to live and do business in a place matters.
As I’ve chronicled in this blog and my other work, Raleigh has been quietly eating Charlotte’s lunch for nearly a decade now as the premier southern business and talent relocation destination, something that was unthinkable a decade ago, when Charlotte’s chops as the country’s number two banking center seemed impossible to beat.
Why does Charlotte need all that government bloat? Beats me.
Charlotte had a per capita income of $30,984 through 2010, almost identical to Raleigh’s $30,079. Poverty rates were also nearly identical over the last decade at nearly 15 percent for Charlotte and almost 14 percent for Raleigh according to census.gov. So what governmental wonders are Charlotteans and Mecklenburgers paying more for? What indispensable local government bloat do we just have to have?
I wish someone would answer that question.
A county to county comparison is worse. Wake County vacuums up a mere $1,887.83 per person, compared to Mecklenburg’s whopping $2,459.99 per person.
Just more evidence of what the next decade will surely prove. The South’s future is bright, and it is in Raleigh.
