City residents and leaders tend to defend the earnings tax on us-vs.-them grounds. They say they need to tax suburbanites who commute to work in St. Louis, because those commuters rely on city police and other services.

A property tax, Wall points out, does much the same thing. In other cities, an employer who owns a large office building pays enough to cover the city services used by the building’s workers.

In St. Louis, the tendency has been to abate property taxes in hopes of keeping jobs — and earnings tax revenue — in the city. Jobs have left anyway, and in recent years the city has handed special payroll-tax breaks to companies such as Anthem and Wells Fargo Advisors.

Those deals add a new level of unfairness to a tax that was already a slow-motion disaster for the city. It’s hard to explain to a fast-food worker that the city needs 1 percent of her wages but can forgo part of the same revenue from a well-paid investment banker or insurance executive.

So let’s not debate whether the city needs the $160 million a year it gets from the earnings tax. Clearly it does.

Let’s talk instead about fairer and more efficient ways to fund city services. Five years ago, the last time voters considered the earnings-tax issue, St. Louis officials promised to study some alternatives. It’s high time we learn what those alternatives are.

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