We need to be careful when we talk about the surplus and the deficit that Toronto has been working with, I hate rob as much as the next person, but it doesn't paint a 100% honest picture.
Toronto always posts a deficit - every year, anywhere from 500-700mil or so - the thing is, we always find a way to balance it. Our budget is something separate from the defecit, it's something we set aside at the beginning of the year telling ourselves "this is all the money we can spend for the year" - we have emergency funds, tax funds and investment funds in that budget. In 2010, because of good investments, the car tax, lack of too many emergencies and a strong cost-saving mantra, we had an unusually high budget surplus of 300million or so (usually it's like 50).
What normally happens with a surplus is, we roll that into next years budget - so we have more money to spend on the city. The deficit we post we find other ways to balance (and we pretty much always do balance it) - admittedly, sometimes by creating or raising taxes - but usually nothing too dramatic.
Now here is where we can hate Rob Ford.
- His policies have so far increased the deficit, not in anyway reduced it - we normally have a strong plan to zero it out, and that is absolutely not happening with Rob. For example, the regular property tax increase has been frozen!
- He is using all the surplus money from 2010 to reduce the deficit, instead of rolling into next years budget (funny how that money is mostly from the car tax Rob has abolished).
- Now, it's finally dawning on him that these conservative practices are going to end up fucking people in the ass, and he's just trying to decide who it is that needs to get fucked - so he's looking at slashing an unprecedented amount of jobs (which is a great idea! Let's get people on unemployment).
- Funny enough, he might still have to raise/create taxes! So not only is he reneging on his promises left right and centre, because of the stumbling destructive path he took to get to this point, we have a huge deficit that doesn't seem to be able to be balanced in the usual nearly harmless way, we have all the surplus money we were going to spend on cool swag just gone, and hundreds of people are going to be out of jobs.
And if he does finally balance the budget, he'll say "See~! I did it! It may have cost hundreds of jobs, I may have had to go back on some promises and undo some tax cuts as well as remove a lot of services, I may have even increased the size of the hole we had to climb out of in the process! But all in all, I did exactly what every other mayor has done before me, just in the fucking worst possible way."
