Tax hikes will work to improve our lives
Taxes are a shortcut, a sweet deal. Taxfinanced public schools fence off social chaos and educate against Trumps.
Taxes pay for paved roads, dirt roads, emergency rooms, hand clinics — in the waiting room gloomy patients surreptitiously count each other’s fingers and arms — ambulances, booze rules, restaurant inspections, building codes, courtrooms, passports, gunless public spaces, tree planting, clearing sewer backups, autopsies — you just try doing your dad’s autopsy, or your own — treaties, airplane inspection, human rights, space travel, Great Lakes pilotage, statistics, patented medicines prices review, privacy, pensions, fish marketing, judging judges . . . I could go on as Star editors are too polite to say “This is boring” but I’ll end with . . . libraries.
On Saturday, I wrote about two columnists, Matthew Lau of the Financial Post and Christopher Bird of Torontoist, arguing about the efficiency of Toronto libraries. It now appears that Lau and Bird may both be right about their supposedly clashing stats, since they seem to be using different sets of numbers.
But that is not what struck me after Lau’s email to me on this subject. We’ve been talking taxes, and disagree on what’s “gravy.” Lau was friendly and open, and I thanked him immediately for his courtesy. In this Trumpy world, I have grown used to emails that seem to come with bloodstains and the barking of dogs unchained. So that was weird.
Here’s another weird thing. Journalist David Frum’s Twitter feed has been a comfort to me in these dark days. He and Nobel economist Paul Krugman make me think the world is still twirling on a rod of sanity.
We’re all in this together. Trump hates taxation. I like it and wish we had more of it. When we each make small contributions, we do big things. Lau’s argument is that Toronto’s libraries are run inefficiently. My argument is that everything is run inefficiently but can still achieve greatness.
This is why I am troubled by Mayor John Tory’s demand that every city department map out 2.6 per cent in cuts.
He stands behind a ludicrous grocerystyle sign, “Saving You Money,” at a podium that popped up on a Scarborough driveway as the snow fell.
I want an oppositional sign. “On the Wrong Things” or maybe just “Your Subway 2 Short.”
If you ride the TTC, you know it needs more money, not less. It is a truncated, dirty, slow system that creates a human caterpillar at rush hour, faces shoved into armpits, rear ends into what one desperately hopes is an umbrella handle. You raised fares for this misery?
TTC head Andy Byford, poor man, was reduced to saying, “My job is to make do with what I am given. Actually for what the TTC is given, 90 cents per rider, the lowest subsidy in North America, I think the TTC and its employees work miracles every day.”
What troubles me about Tory is his contributing to the demonization of taxation. Those signs don’t help. Scarborough residents need more services, not fewer. Why boast about not giving it to them?
Lau wrote that libraries were inefficient by their nature and unnecessary “antiquated bricks-and-mortar citywide branches.”
But humans are inefficient and unnecessary. So is health care for anyone over 40. Why bother? People in their 90s should have the decency to expire quietly. They add no efficiency to the market.
And those small-town Ontario schools that are closing so children will spend hours on a school bus headed for a distant central school? It’s more efficient. But rural families hate it, and they’re right. Sometimes efficiency becomes such a misery that it turns into inefficiency.
The Ontario Liberals will regret this. I note they often bow to the market and do efficient things, like reducing therapy for kids with autism, and then backtrack after complaints. But families mysteriously feel intense inefficient love for their children. They’re funny that way.
Libraries have been my salvation, as have been my two children. Libraries gave me a free starter education, my parents paid for my inefficient English Lit degrees, and we paid for our children’s university education with spendy professors instead of cheap massive open online courses.
How the market would laugh. But people love each other and their country, so they pay taxes to help other faceless humans. Market forces would allegedly sort this nonsense out, but I doubt it.
I like taxes and wish we had more of them. When we each make small contributions, we do big things