Grimace
Active Member
In no way did I suggest the politics of Toronto is about me. That suggestion exclusively comes from you.
What is tenuous about my understanding of social and economic policy? I'm more than willing to admit I'm wrong if presented with better and/or more accurate information (I've already conceded once in this thread concerning the legality of deficits).
In the past 3 days you've posted about a half-dozen long explanations of your views on economic and social policy in this thread. Most of what you've written about isn't even in the realm of municipal responsibility. You claim to believe in the well-debunked concept of "supply-side economics", and somehow think this is connected to fiscal conservatism rather than the reckless deficit building of Reagan and republicans thereafter. You have come out as an advocate of two tier healthcare and education, which makes me question why you are a member of the federal liberal party. You seem to think the protestant work ethic, which you have dubbed the Weberian work ethic, has something to do with anything. You throw around terms like "tax and spend" and "slash n' burn". You have made a long series of assumptions about Chow that shows a gross simplification of the NDP policy platform, and a fairly crucial misunderstanding of how the municipal government works. You claim that Bob Rae "blew the budget" without any apparent understanding of the fiscal mess left by the Peterson government or the impact of the early 90s recession on Ontario. You make bald assertions about the impact of high taxes on an economy that show your supply side bona fides but which are unsupported and unsupportable by data.
In short, your brand of "fiscal conservatism" is a low tax model consistent with US republican party policy that has resulted in higher deficits and has slowed down the economy by putting greater wealth in the hands of the rich, who do not spend it, while stagnating and lowering the wages of the middle class, who do spend it.
Most of what I argued rests on this question: Should unions be paid more than their market worth by virtue of their affiliation with the public sector?
I don't think so. There is a lot of resentment among those in the private sector who do comparable work, but for a much smaller paycheck.
The contention that public sector workers make more than private sector workers is unsupported by data.
Some public sector workers in some fields may make more that workers in the private sector. When this happens, it is well publicized.
Much of the time, private sector workers make more than public sector workers in the same field. This is rarely publicized, and instead people will argue that public sector workers don't work as hard.
There is a concerted strategy on the right to try to engender resentment among non-unionized workers against unionized workers, public sector or not, by contending that the unionized workers get paid more. For private sector workers, the emphasis is on the claim that unions cause businesses to leave. For public sector workers, the emphasis is that you are paying for these overpaid workers. This is a race-to-the-bottom strategy that has been quite successful not only in engendering resentment, but also in causing the wages of the large majority of workers to increase at a rate lower than inflation over the last 20 years.