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How Will Trash Fee Affect Your Bottom Line?

In one fell swoop, the city's proposed $300 trash fee will eat up more than half the money ­that an average Philadelphia household is saving from the small, incremental wage tax reductions that the city initiated in 1992.

The mean average income for a Philadelphia household was $50,673 annually in 2008, according to the U. S. Census Bureau. Wage taxes on that income are now 3.9296 percent, or $1,991 per year, a savings of $522 from what the same household would have paid before the wage tax reductions began.

Mayor Nutter and City Council suspended the wage tax reductions two years ago at the beginning of the national recession, but they are scheduled to resume in the 2014 fiscal year, which starts July 1, 2013.