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<br />CCM Economics, LLC Orange County Tax Equity Page 40 <br /> <br />who preserves the park that they visit all could have been educated in a public school system. <br />Therefore, even though the household doesn’t have children in the school system, they are <br />beneficiaries of the school system by getting to live in an organized and educated society. <br />This report has used municipal and county budgets combined with other census and <br />economic data to understand which county level government goods and services are available to <br />which citizens of the different geographic areas of Orange County. Furthermore, this report has <br />estimated the federal, state, and local tax burden for the average citizen of each of the different <br />geographic areas in Orange County. The results show two different yet interesting things. The <br />first is that most of any imbalance between taxes paid and benefits received is derived from <br />inequities in federal spending and taxation levels and not from county government spending and <br />taxation policies. For example, Chapel Hill residents on a per capita basis are paying nearly <br />$8,000 in taxes to the Federal government but only receiving $3,000 in services from the federal <br />government for a net imbalance of -$5,000. In comparison to the county provided goods and <br />services, Chapel Hill residents are paying $3,300 in taxes and fees and receiving $3,200 in <br />county provided goods and services. In short, if citizens want to see a more equitable <br />distribution of taxes and services, they should petition their national level representatives. <br />The second thing that is of note in the results of this report is that the ‘negative’ amount <br />of net summation of goods and services at the local level as reported in Table 5 is something of a <br />misnomer. Recall that the municipal and county level governments collect revenues today from <br />a variety of sources to pay for today’s provision of good and services. However, some of these <br />revenues that are collected today are shifted to reserve funds that will be used to pay for the <br />future provision of goods and services. This report has adopted a ‘snapshot methodology’ <br />concerning local government spending and taxation. This ‘snapshot’ of current revenues is <br />77