This can occur even within an area. Years ago, the Birmingham City Council was aghast that workers employed by downtown companies lived outside the city limits of Bham. Why, they are using our services, driving on our streets and we don't collect a penny of tax from them. So in the crazy pretzel logic world of government, they instituted a payroll tax on employees working in the city who did not live within the city.
Great plan until.....employees en masse complained to their employers who over time, moved some or all facilities to the suburbs. Periodically, the Atlanta City Council who is never guilty of mental gymnastics contemplates taxing the same individuals who have the audacity to drive on Atlanta streets, breathe city air and not pay tax for the privilege of doing so. So far, no such law has passed.
What Birmingham forgot is that those workers and their companies bought lunches, office supplies, meeting rooms and hotel rooms within the city. This is one illustration of why government will always engage in deficit spending: it has no profit goal, only ways to raise revenue and it becomes short sighted.
My job includes helping corporate clients make relocation decisions. A blue chip well-known American company hired me to do that within metro Atlanta. I picked up three of their reps at the airport and went to work. At lunch, the employees said they had read that the Cobb County commissioners had passed a resolution against gays and lesbians. I don't remember the details now but it was obviously a stupid move on their part. They declared that they would not locate the facility within Cobb County. Frankly, I was impressed: here was a company with a social conscience. It wrecked my day however because most of my work had pointed to Cobb County. In the end, guess where they located the new facility? Cobb County simply because the tax and training incentives outweighed all other concerns.
And as an aside, it is humorous to see Phenix City and talent in the same sentence? Have you been to Phenix City? :funn:
...elgodobo, you just slay me.
