Quote:
Originally Posted by Bunk
There's no doubt the Mayor spent some of his political capital in doing so. As did the decision to keep tax room the last three years that led to the rather misleading indictments of wild spending increases of 30+%. The fact is that about half that increase in revenue went to build capital projects (central library, rec centres, library branches, transportation infrastructure and now flood recovery) that simply would not have happened without that tax room. We don't have new grants from other levels of government and existing grants got clawed back. The federal government screwed us on the P3 deal. The choice was go back to building nothing like the 90s or take things a bit into our own hands and build. If the Province did not leave that tax room, the tax burden would have been exactly the same, it's just the City would not have that revenue, the Province would.
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I like the part where you talk about the value of the capital projects. If the debate was phrased that way then it might have been better recieved in my opinion (Afterall was it not ~60% of respondents to the $52 million question imply support for some kind of spending?).
I don't like the way you in the last paragraph and Nenshi over the course of the campaign phrased the tax room grab. As voters in this election we were evaluating only the municipal level of politicians and the government they oversee. Therefore the fact that the province taxed us less in exactly the same proportion that the city taxed us more should be disregarded when evaluating only the local government's performance. The only thing that matters when voting for municipal politicians is to only look at the amount that they alone are responsible for.
If taken a step further hypothetically let's say the Federal government cut income taxes by 10%, but the province jacked up income taxes 10% at the same time. Would it be more reflective of the province's fiscal performance to say that they jacked up taxes by 10% or to net the two numbers and pretend that there wasn't a provincial tax increase at all because the net between the two is 0%?