The price of a movie
Now that we are parents, we don’t go out to the theater anymore, so it is exclusively DVDs at home for us. How much does it cost us?
Last night, using my trusty Kill-a-Watt, I measured how much energy it costs to watch a 2-hour movie using our stereo, dvd player and projector. Total energy: 0.42KWh. With Portland energy rates, that’s about 4 cents. Not bad.
We don’t rent movies much – mostly we get them from the Multnomah County Library. According to Multnomah County property tax summaries, 4.9% of our property taxes go to fund the Multnomah County Library. For our house, that’s $447/year. We probably watch about 50-100 movies a year, meaning each movie costs us between $4.50 and $9.00. Compare that with a Netflix membership cost of $20/month ($240/year). It isn’t a fair comparison, really, because the library lets us have several DVDs out at once but also has extremely long waiting lists for new movies.
Since we don’t have a choice about funding the library, we are embracing it. But sometimes I wonder – is a DVD collection money well spent for our public library? I would really like to see the statistic on how much of the 4.9% of our property tax dollars goes towards DVDs.
I’d like to share a little bit of good news with you about your tax bill and the Library. One thing you may not have noticed on the tax summary information sheet is that Multnomah County retains only 24% of your total property tax bill. The rest goes to the state, the city, Tri-Met, PCC and other local agencies. Working backwards with your numbers, that would mean that your annual Library tax support is $107.27 and the average cost of a DVD checkout for your family is $1.07 to $2.15 for three weeks.
Might I suggest adding a few books a year to the mix? Four new hardbacks at $25 to $35 dollars apiece would clear your Library tax value in no time. Then all your DVDs would be gravy!
According to the summary here,
Multnomah County retains about
24 cents of each dollar that is collected
in property taxes. The county spends
those funds in the following ways
…
Library – 4.9 cents
Unless this document is incorrect (or my math is bad), 4.9 cents / dollar is 4.9%. Most people don’t pay as much as we do annually, of course. At my old house, the cost would have been something more like $150/year. We just have an especially high property tax bill. One thing I have always wondered is how much of my 4.9 cents goes towards DVDs? How much for music CDs? If taxpayers knew the number, would they pay for it?
Annually, my wife and I use enough books to easily justify our Multnomah County Library taxes, so we can’t complain. In fact, I would say that we actually benefit quite a bit from library services. Looking at it that way, then our movies are free
.