Quote:
Originally Posted by curves2000
Budget's don't always need to be fully spent! This isn't just a city hall thing, it goes with companies, businesses and personal finance. If you find you have saved extra savings, does this mean you always need to spend?
Holding the line on expenses as much as possible, increasing renew/replacement cycles on equipment within reason, consolidation of office space, selling under utilized assets, reviewing corporate and city policy on things and more. Sometimes items just aren't in the budget and the costs,
can't be justified. Sometimes the logical thing is to actually spend money on the capital side for renew, replace, upgrade and more in order to save it on the expense side. That can be an effective strategy for lowering expenses.
The spin off affect of having budgets that aren't managed properly is having to increase costs across the board in a multitude of places, not like the 3.6% increase in taxes they are referencing.
If you know Calgary's budget, you would know that the city is facing SIGNIFICANT budget concerns related to a whole host of major projects ranging from event center, Arts Commons, BMO Center, a drawdown of reserve funds and needing to spend a significant amount of money for massive wastewater upgrades. In life there are nice to have's and must have's and they need to be clearly defined.
https://www.sprawlcalgary.com/calgar...tre-sprawlcast
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calga...%241%20billion.
Balance sheet strength matters in finance but this notion that City of Calgary can't reasonably cut expenses in order to free up added capital for more urgent projects and high priority concerns is not rooted in reality. |
No one is saying that they can’t find any ways to save money, it’s when you imply that there is enough savings available to not have a significant impact on the services provided and that it’s not a reasonable expectation for budgets in growing municipalities or businesses to increase where you’re entering a fantasy world.
The vagueness of your hypothetical scenario examples and rhetorical questions don’t help. “If you save money does that mean you have to spend it?”. Obviously the answer is no you don’t have to do anything with that money, but that doesn’t mean there may not be consequences to that decision.
Quote:
Originally Posted by GGG
There’s an implied per capita and inflation in there.
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Look GGG I know you enjoy playing devil’s advocate but you know curves’ schtick by this point. Pointing out that you can find savings isn’t an issue, pointing it out while acting as though there won’t be an impact, while plausible, isn’t likely and comes off as a similar argument to trickle down economics. Plausible but unlikely and certainly not a guaranteed outcome.
It should be readily apparent to anyone based on how curves started going off on this tangent in response to what was basically a sarcastic fat joke directed at a councillor that he’s just driving a narrative and not really engaging in a good faith discussion. As he typically does. I like hearing different perspectives, especially from someone who based on their posting history may in fact be the most interesting person in the world, but I don’t like bull#### arguments that are clearly made in bad faith.