Do Lake City or McBain have a city income tax?

No — and in Missaukee County the question nearly answers itself. The county holds exactly two incorporated places: Lake City, with fewer than a thousand year-round residents wrapped around the north shore of Lake Missaukee, and McBain, a Dutch-rooted farm town of grain elevators and church steeples that is smaller still. No villages, no other cities. Everything else is township, and townships have no power to levy an income tax — Michigan’s 1964 law hands that power to cities alone, and just 24 of them statewide use it.

You cannot even commute into one by accident from here. Cadillac, a dozen miles west and the area’s job center, levies nothing. The closest cities that do are Grayling and Big Rapids, each about an hour out, each taking 0.5 percent from nonresidents who work there.

So the county’s two little city halls run on property taxes, and the property tells the story: cottages and docks around the lake in Lake City, dairy ground around McBain. On the Fourth of July, Lake City swells far past its own population for the Greatest Fourth in the North, and all that holiday money changes hands with no city tax on anyone’s wages — and no local sales tax either, since Michigan does not allow one.