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Rob Ford's Toronto

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Admiral Beez said:
I don't care about the mill rate %. I have a 4 bedroom home in Cabbagetown and pay way more property tax than my brother in Mississauga who has a similarly sized home. Sure, if I sold it I'd have more money than my brother, but I'm not moving, I don't care about resale. All I care about is keeping my total property tax as low as possible.
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I really want to rip into you because this post is full of ignorance. However, i believe you didn't think before you posted.
Let's start with this mill rate, every city in the developped world works this way. You guys are acting like the city of Toronto has some sort of special way of calculating residential taxes that's completely different than any other city in the world.
If you live in an area that's in high demand by wealthy people than the value of your home should be higher and you should be paying more in taxes. Toronto has several neighborhoods where your tax bill will be less than your brother in Mississauga. Or are you trying to say that a 4 bedroom home in Cabbagetown should pay the same taxes as a 4 bedroom home in a not so highly sought after area? Should a 1000sq foot condo in Moss Park pay the same taxes as a 1000sq foot condo in Yorkville?
The city didn't put a gun to your head and forced you to buy in that area. You are free to move if you are not financially able to pay.
If you meant every single word you said, then Mr Beez, you are exactly what is wrong with Toronto.
 
toto said:
I don't think Ford's actions are his alone. As CN pointed out early in this thread, KPMG was hired by Mike Harris and recommended amalgamation. Connect the dots and I can't help but think that everything Ford does is under the command of Harris. Harris, through the Ford brothers is finishing off what he started with amalgamation. The slow decay of Toronto's socal fabric. Councillors supporting Ford are doing so for future political aspirations. Possibly provincial PC or federal CPC nominations. The thing about politicians, is that once elected, most spend their time in office planning their re-election or their political career advancement. Thankfully some of them are actually doing the job they were elected to do. How's that for a conspiracy theory?
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This is just a silly allegation and fear mongering. Suggesting that Harris and the Fords have some secret alliance to gut Toronto and it's services.
 
tkip said:
This is just a silly allegation and fear mongering. Suggesting that Harris and the Fords have some secret alliance to gut Toronto and it's services.
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"Fear mongering"? Yeah, maybe the left and center should borrow a page out of the 'rights' playbook for a change!
 
Admiral Beez said:
That all said, I sincerely don't believe that you can fix the city's woes by increasing taxes.
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Unfortunately the only way to keep revenues up to costs is to have tax increases. This isn't the case with sales tax and income tax because those taxes grow with the number of taxpayers and grow with increased sales and incomes. With property tax no tax increase means lowered revenue in terms of spending power due to inflation. You may not be able to fix the city's woes by increasing taxes (e.g. inefficient delivery of services, poor customer service at the TTC, cost of items downloaded by the province and made mandatory expenses by the province, etc.) but you are definitely going to create more problems than are solved aiming for zero tax increases or tax reductions. The problem is that inefficiencies aren't found looking at budgets, they are found looking at workflow, policies, and the jobs individuals are performing. Finding lazy or incompetent workers, red tape, etc. aren't a budgeting exercise.
 
Admiral Beez said:
I don't care about the mill rate %. I have a 4 bedroom home in Cabbagetown and pay way more property tax than my brother in Mississauga who has a similarly sized home. Sure, if I sold it I'd have more money than my brother, but I'm not moving, I don't care about resale. All I care about is keeping my total property tax as low as possible.
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A lot of people have already taken you to town, Beez, but I have to reiterate: this is ridiculous and hypocritical of you.

As a conservative, you should put your money where your mouth is: you should believe that people should take responsibility for their actions, not ask the state to subsidize your lifestyle and put a lot of faith in the invisible hand of the free market to redistribute resources and outcomes in the most efficient way possible.

You may think it's unfair that you are being charged on the value of a property that you do not wish to leave, but you are not entitled to live in one of the most prestigious neighbourhoods in the city. It has nothing to do with how many bedrooms you have; a large number of wealthy people have expressed an interest to live in your area and increased the price of housing accordingly. If you find that you have been priced out of the area, that's just too bad. If you think the taxes are too high and the government should cut 'waste', there are probably a hundred other people who would be more than willing to swoop in, buy your house and pay the tax rate you grumble about - they're just richer than you, and if they can afford and are willing to pay the current tax rate, why even worry about trimming 'waste'?

It's always fun to be a conservative and snub your nose at people less fortunate than you in the name of the free market...until you wind up being one of those people.
 
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Hipster Duck said:
A lot of people have already taken you to town, Beez, but I have to reiterate: this is ridiculous and hypocritical of you.

As a conservative, you should put your money where your mouth is: you should believe that people should take responsibility for their actions, not ask the state to subsidize your lifestyle and put a lot of faith in the invisible hand of the free market to redistribute resources and outcomes in the most efficient way possible.

You may think it's unfair that you are being charged on the value of a property that you do not wish to leave, but you are not entitled to live in one of the most prestigious neighbourhoods in the city. It has nothing to do with how many bedrooms you have; a large number of wealthy people have expressed an interest to live in your area and increased the price of housing accordingly. If you find that you have been priced out of the area, that's just too bad. If you think the taxes are too high and the government should cut 'waste', there are probably a hundred other people who would be more than willing to swoop in, buy your house and pay the tax rate you grumble about - they're just richer than you, and if they can afford and are willing to pay the current tax rate, why even worry about trimming 'waste'?

It's always fun to be a conservative and snub your nose at people less fortunate than you in the name of the free market...until you wind up being one of those people.
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Um, okay. What?

First of all, I see no reason to attribute the position of being against property-tax-by-valuation a "conservative" position. For instance, I think of members of the Polish side of my family who lived in the Roncesvalles area from the 1950s onward, and were unceremoniously smoked out of their own neighborhood through property tax hikes in the past two decades, as the area has become more and more an attractive target for real estate speculation -- funded courtesy of consumer price inflation, through money printing, for the purpose of fixing lending rates low.

The same story, of course, plays out in Cabbagetown. And to be quite honest with you, it is your response here which sounds classist to me, and feeds into a government-sponsored system of wealth-inequality.

For my part: I'm a radical capitalist libertarian. But unlike whatever stereotype you have of us free market types, I find it quite amusing when people attribute classism as manifest of my ideology, when it is people like yourself which support the reification of classism by subscribing to such class-stratifying taxation systems as the one you just made a stirring defense of.

Returning to mainstream politics, it was after all, the provincial NDP which was promising to change the provincial law to fix property rates based on the purchase price of a home. Not the Tories.
 
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Hipster Duck said:
A lot of people have already taken you to town, Beez, but I have to reiterate.
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No need. As I've said above, which interestingly no one has quoted or commented on.
Admiral Beez said:
- I don't begrudge paying my fair share of taxes however they are calculated, for I value our public parks, services, infrastructure, etc. Nor do I wholly agree that a city should be run like a business, since services provided for free, like libraries or my local Riverdale Farm would never work in a business model.
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Should property taxes be based on property value as opposed to one's drain on the city's resources? The former seems to be the consensus here, based somehow on the presumption of one's ability to pay higher tax, i.e. if you've got a higher property value then you presumably have a higher income, or if you don't you can sell to someone who has the higher income. If it was based on usage of city services, then a family in a Moss Park apartment would pay the same as a family in a High Park condo. To make it fair we could eliminate the capital gains exemption for residential sales.

But, this type of usage-based poll rate as opposed to value-based mill rate will never happen in Toronto; so let's get back to the horrors of our Chris Farley-esque mayor.
 
Property taxes are the worst kind of taxation -- they don't rise with inflation or growth, forcing fiscally responsible governments to face the media hit of a "tax grab" every year. They're also inherently regressive with no real exemptions or deductions like you see with income tax. Punishing people for being savvy enough to end up owning residential property in a "hot" neighbourhood is the definition of unfair.

Miller's strategy to hold property taxes at inflation and use other "revenue tools" to balance the budget was a better idea than most realize. It's truly a pity that a bunch of self-described conservatives decided to freak the hell out over a $5-per-month fee.

Ontario really should develop some sort of system where municipalities get a percentage of the local income tax collected, but that seems unlikely given the current political winds.
 
What we should do is get rid of inflation to begin with. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon and is completely caused by the government. Infation is a tax. It is how governments subsidize their own borrowing and cheap leverage for primary lenders.
 
Admiral Beez said:
But, this type of usage-based poll rate as opposed to value-based mill rate will never happen in Toronto; so let's get back to the horrors of our Chris Farley-esque mayor.
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A usage based tax would charge sick and poor the most, and the healthy and rich the least. There is no point in having a government in that case. It may be more fair for the city to make 50% of its money from property tax and the other 50% from sales taxes in the city and income taxes based on residence, in that sales and income speaks more to cash on hand than property tax, but it isn't going to happen. Property tax based on property value is as responsible as the city can be with the tax tools it has and it is only responsible for them to keep tax increases in check with inflation.
 
I wonder what the implications of this are and if Ford actually thinks about it.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...n-city-hall-cost-cutting-line/article2100343/


Scrapping licences for cats and dogs, scaling back business permits and reducing by-law enforcement are the latest money-saving options served up by the consultants looking to separate the meat from the gravy at Toronto City Hall.

The cost-cutting suggestions are contained in the fifth instalment of a review of the city’s core services obtained exclusively by The Globe and Mail. The latest report seizes on opportunities within Municipal Licensing and Standards Division, responsible for certifying everything from body-rub parlours to barber shops, plumbers to pawnbrokers at a $21.5-million cost to the city.
 
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EMP1729 said:
These KPMG reports are getting ridiculous. It's like they are not even trying now to hide any bias. They are preaching to the Ford choir.
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Actually, I'm beginning to believe that they're secretly setting up the mayor for failure by deliberately making provocative recommendations about which programs and services to cut.
 
I really don't understand how ending programs that make money for the city is supposed to be cutting "gravy".
 
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