Tag Archives: User fees

Who’s Nickel And Diming Us Now?

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And in other city news, little league baseball teams, along with other youth organizations, will now have to start paying permit fees to use city parks.

Lost under the heavy din of the subway v. LRT skirmish, fallout from the 2012 budget has begun. In raising the hourly rate for park permit fees and applying them to groups previously exempt, the city is now balancing its books on the backs of those who, for too long, have shirked their fiscal responsibilities: the children. More specifically, freeloading children who expect us to pay for their frivolous pastimes. Enough is enough, you prepubescent freeloaders. Didn’t your parents tell you? We’ve Stopped The Gravy Train.

Before you start screaming bloody murder, Mayor Rob Ford was elected with an overwhelming landslide mandate to nickel and dime us to death. Remember? So pony up that $13,000, Leaside Baseball Association. It’s only about $80 extra a player. If we have as many little leaguers in this city as we do car owners, that would more than make up for rescinding the vehicle registration tax that was totally nickel and diming them.

Talk about your robbing (would be) Pete (Roses) to pay (would be) Paul (Hawkins’s).

And yeah, I went there for that joke.

To be fair to the mayor, it was the taxpayer he promised to respect not snot nosed playground warriors. Maybe when they start paying taxes, he’ll start respecting them. Until then, consider this a lesson learned. There are no free rides or free lunches unless, of course, it becomes politically expedient to provide such things. Playing a sport or participating in some form of activity should be seen as a nice to have not a need to have. Keeping a property tax increase below the rate of inflation doesn’t come free, folks.

We can only not have a revenue problem if we generate revenue, and we can only generate revenue through not raising taxes appropriately or cut services significantly, or both. In order to not raise taxes appropriately means having to do it in a more untaxing manner. Call them user fees instead. Sounds perfectly reasonable, right? You use it. You pay for it. What could be fairer than that.

It wasn’t like out there on the campaign trail then candidate Rob Ford hid his intentions from anybody. He was upfront and forward about who was going to pay and how much and how often. All about accountability and transparency. Nobody could be surprised about any of this now.

“I think it’s unrealistic to hit them now with a cost that they didn’t see coming,” Councillor John Parker said of the new increases in permit fees.

Ooops.

Somebody didn’t get the memo.

Somebody didn’t read between the lines.

Somebody’s been had.

This was all supposed to be so painless, yeah? Simply a matter of better bookkeeping, really. Two, three, four percent gone, easy. We wouldn’t even notice. Money was being spent that didn’t need to be spent. Once that was tracked down and eliminated, like, in a heartbeat, the mayor knew where the deadwood was hiding out, stinking the place up, we’d be as right as rain. No fuss, no bother.

Nothing drastic changed for Rob Ford upon assuming the office of mayor. There were no large, unexpected gaps between revenues and spending. In fact, he was greeted with a surplus. Only the terminology changed. Cuts in revenue streams were called tax cuts and freezes. Cuts to services were now referred to as ‘adjustments’ or ‘efficiencies’. Annual surpluses that had been previously thought of as a sign of good fiscal stewardship became hideous oversights and lamentable accounting errors known as ‘one time savings’.

We can’t count on ‘one time savings’ that happen every year to bail us out all the time, folks.

Nothing changed except the tune. Campaign guarantees became more, m’eh, fuzzy guidelines, nice to haves not actually anything concrete. Shrinking the size of government turns out not to be such a snap. People tend to notice when things they depended on suddenly disappear or cost more to use.

Elect me and I promise to reduce the services the city provides while charging more for the ones we maintain.

I wonder what kind of mandate Rob Ford would be touting now if, as a candidate, he’d talked openly and truthfully about how he actually planned on governing this city.

— genuinely curiously submitted by Cityslikr

Anti-Tax Is Anti-Citizen

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Since government, or social organization, is among the wants of man, as truly as food or clothing, we must recognize it in the science of political economy, and provide for it. Government implies functionaries and expenditures. How shall these be maintained? Evidently by the contributions of all, for all are interested in its existence. It may, therefore, rightfully claim a share of all that labor and capital have created.

— “The Science Of Wealth” (1866), by Amasa Walker

When Mayor Rob Ford succeeded in having the Vehicle Registration Tax repealed last month, he crowed, “It’s a great day for the taxpayers of Toronto. We just put $64-million back in their pockets. They can do what they want. They can go out and spend it, create jobs and stimulate the economy or they can save it.”

I don’t know if the mayor really believes all that neoconservative nonsense about tax cuts stimulating the economy and, in turn, increasing government revenues. There’s no reason why he wouldn’t since it’s an empty trope that’s been all the rage for the past 30 years or so despite having little real world evidence to back it up. And I also wonder if the mayor understands that even if tax cuts were shown to increase government revenue, municipal governments in this province would not see their coffers filled much as the kind of tax revenues they have access to aren’t the sales or consumption taxes that, theoretically, increase in a stimulated economy. It’s a subtle distinction Mayor Ford hasn’t shown much of a propensity in understanding.

In cutting the VRT, city council has essentially amputated one of the hard earned revenue tools it was granted through the City of Toronto Act. As it will if the mayor eventually carries through on his pledge to do away with the land transfer tax. His proposal to freeze property taxes on this year’s budget (which is actually a cut – see Spacing’s Dylan Reid explain in his post) slices mightily into the city’s biggest generator of revenue.

Despite what politicos on the right and their media promoters insist on telling us, taxation is not a dirty word. It’s what buys us civilization and all that. Striking the right balance on which taxes to implement and at what levels in order to not stifle healthy economic growth is the key to successful governance. Any idiot can simply appeal to our basest instincts of greed and self-interest in a call for slashing taxes. It’s proven to be a winning strategy for decades now.

The loss of the VRT revenue and the mayor’s proposed property tax freeze will cost the city in excess of $100 million. How will that money be offset? Service cuts that Mayor Ford guaranteed on the campaign trail wouldn’t happen and some $23 million in user fee increases. What’s that about Torontonians tired of being nickel-and-dimed to death? His Respect For Taxpayers seems to be very, very selective.

Anti-tax politicians are never looking out for ‘the little guy’ despite their claims to the contrary. The last thing they want to do is to give a voice to the voiceless. Their primary intent, first and foremost, is to diminish the power of government to properly look after all of its citizens regardless of where they are on the economic spectrum. If they can get in a little reverse Robin Hood wealth redistribution while they’re at it, so much the better. Anti-tax politicians are not grassroots heroes.

They are abrogators of responsibility. They don’t govern. They vandalize and plunder. They never leave anything better than they found it. They only make things worse. And time and time again, we have to chase them from office and start to clean everything up.

You’d think we’dve learned all that by now.

— get it through our thick skullsly submitted by Cityslikr