Quote:
Originally Posted by JobHopper
That may be true but you can't just go and raise taxes just because they're amongst the lowest in the country. What my point is, taxes can't be going up faster than people's wages. I always think that all levels of government need to better accountable of taxpayers money.
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That's the other sustainability issue here. Everytime the arguement that taxes have been increasing higher than inflation gets brought up, it gets shouted down by the claim that 'the city's costs are a different basket of goods that happens to experience cost inflation higher than the 'Calgary CPI.'
I can buy that as a valid explaination for a one-off year, or a trend that happens for a few years. However it's not sustainable for that to persistantly be the case forever. No one seems to have concrete answers to this or want to talk about it. I'm sure Nenshi doesn't want it to be a ballot box issue on how much more people should pay in taxes to make up for the water/utilities/infrastructure deficit, nor does he want to promise that taxes will be more in line with inflation after said deficit is funded.