a flagrant offender!

They probably could. I don't see why they couldn't. I think the idea was to try and balance out the taxing. In larger cities anyway, you tend to have a lot of apartment buildings and many of them are rent controlled so the property owner often can't raise rents to cover the tax costs. You also have a lot of people that work in teh city and live elsewhere.

By taxing the income (usually in addition to property taxes!) they get revenues from these other people that also use city services but don't own property within the tax district.

This story isn't that ridiculous. The IRS sent us a bill by doubling up on our IRA withdrawal in 2003, and increased our tax liability. I sent several letters including copies of how they erroneously computed our tax increase. They used the 2004 tax table to increase our liability, so we paid it, because it wasn't worth the hassle with IRS. This year, they sent us a bill for $29.33 in penalities that we also paid. I wonder how many hours of IRS work time it took for them to continue this charade.

Thanks, fishin', that makes sense.