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Here's the thing... people make it sound as though all arts, literature, etc... would instantly disappear if the City of Toronto cut back on their subsidy of it, which is absurd. If for a period of time they didn't say, commission any new public sculptures - it doesn't also mean they're going to pull up a flatbed and remove all existing
sculptures from the city. What we see in the city now would remain largely intact - it just wouldn't be added to for a period of time. The vast majority of public art is not actually city funded at all, so if they were to cut away 20% of their funding, it would be equivalent to cutting back 1 or 2% of what may be produced over the period the cutbacks are in effect.
It's like a woman whose husband says "Honey, our company is cutting back and I'm only working 4 days a week for the rest of the year. We have to pay the mortgage and buy food, so to save money for a while, we'll eat out only once a week instead of twice, rent as many movies as we see in the theatre, and um, you can only buy one pair of shoes a month" and her replying "Only eat out once a week? But our friends will think we don't want to spend time with them!!" and even better, "No more shoes!? What am I supposed to do, go to work barefoot!@#?", when she has 2 closets full of shoes. "Come on now, let's not get hysterical, I'm going to be mowing the lawn myself instead of paying the landscapers." he says to her. "Philistine!!" she screams. "Suck it up, princess - I might have to sell my motorcycle!"
Here's the other side of that arguement:
1)If you cut the funding it becomes that much more difficult to bring it back at a later time
2)Toronto already horribly underfunds the arts per capita compared to so many other cities
3)Toronto is not experiencing a temporary funding shortfall - it has a permanent structural deficit largely of the current administrations own making
The later isn't true at all ... not even close ... the car registration tax only brought in a small amount, maybe 10% of the structural deficit ... this thing has always been around ... we've gotten around it using:
1) Reserve funds (which are gone now for the most part):
2) Extra revenue (i.e. less expence) from the previous budget.
3) One time provincial funding ...
4) Offloading some thing to the province.
We really need to do as much of 4) as possible ... and the rest must come from more revenue / or cuts. Pretty simply overall
The failure to raise property taxes last year, coupled with using the surplus to fund that rather than rolling it forward (as well as killing the VRT) is more than half of the shortfall. If you look at past budget negotiations you will also find that the true shortfall is much less than predicted. Combined, you would find that the true deficit this year would have been pretty small - less than $200M, perhaps much less.
I've been out of town for a few weeks.
Did I miss anything? Probably not ... it's not like the brother's Ford could make themselves look any more ridiculous than they were.
What's with all the Atwood references ... is Ford driving us to such low-brow literature?
Good point regarding no tax increase last year ... but the extra revenue was a one time thing so that doesn't count, falls under to category 2) above
700million or the like is accurate without taking any of the 4 above into account. Your right that when you do, even this year it's closer to 400-500 million. But a lot of this isn't necessarily a yearly thing. If it is the revenue / expense predictions in the budget are fairly off *all the time* that's another problem.
And this is what really goes unsaid, which is that to the extent that the city has a structural financial problem, it is because a conservative provincial government wrecked the structure. The city has been forced to take care of things previously covered by the province. It's not that the city has been routinely profligate, but rather that the way things had been set up before Harris can't handle the extra downloaded burden.With respect to past provincial top ups, everybody knows this is "wink wink" funding to cover the unfunded provincial downloading from the Harris era
Same thing that usually happens with more right-wing governments. Less $ will lead to more poverty, more homelessness, more crime, more deaths, and yet the rich get richer.God knows what things will look like if we end up with Hudak at Queen's Park, and thus conservatives at all three levels of government.
A good point made in one article a while back.
This has happened every year for a long time now ... the one Ford is tackling isn't even that large compared to some other years. In the end they tend to get it done with very little media coverage, it looks like Ford is going for the long term solution .... which in some ways is a good thing no ? (you can argue the way he'll get to it isn't though).
Rob Ford musing that there should be advertisements in school gymnasiums.
What he should do is sell advertising space on his suit (he is big enough) and his minivan. He could generate revenue that can cover his salary, thus saving the taxpayers money.
Nothing like having a KFC ad in the gym you're exercising in.