Great moments in crowdsourcing: Tracking tax policies in other cities

Local liberal blog Young Philly Politics calls out its readers to help with a little comparison project, a project that It's Our Money's Ben Waxman got a head start on.

by Dan Pohlig

Published Dec. 18, 2008, 4:00 p.m. ET

Frequent Young Philly Politics contributor Marc Stier has an interesting little (or big) project in mind for that blog's readers. He wants to examine other cities throughout the United States to see how they are using tax policy to deal with their own budget shortfalls. To do this, he enlists his readers in a cool little crowdsourcing exercise, asking them to pick a city and do the research to find out whether or not that city has raised taxes to make up for drops in revenue.

In selecting cities to look at, Stier chooses an unscientific, though logical, point of reference:

I think the cities it would be most helpful to look at are those of roughly the same size and importance in their region/ state as Philly. You know...all those cities that have MLB teams.

We can help out with a little of the work that It's Our Money's Ben Waxman has already done on this front. A few days back, Ben pointed out that at least four states are considering raising taxes.

Feel free to check out the YPP project and choose your own city to examine. We'll be keeping an eye on it to see how it turns out. If you're coming to this blog from some other city, please let us know what your experiences have been in your home city. Is it experiencing similar shortfalls in revenue? Are your elected officials talking about cuts to services, raising taxes, both, or neither?