I regret to inform you that Rob Ford is no Chris Christie.
I know Chris Christie. Chris Christie is a Youtube favourite of mine.
Ford may still be “better than the alternative”, and admittedly, the moderation and format of the debate (a cross between Canadian Idol and the Jerry Springer Show) was ridiculous, but setting that side… I think it’s safe to declare the city of Toronto to be utterly doomed. How quickly the Moment Of Doom arrives is now in the hands of the voters.
(Heh. This comes as the Canadian Tamil Broadcasting Corporation published ads on its radio station and website that called for Tamil residents to vote for Rob Ford because he married a woman.)
ET;
You make a lot of assumptions. I’m not a union member. I’m retired. I worked for the city for 25 years, a union member for the firt 10, a management supervisor for the last 15. I come at you as a person who has been on both sides of this. It isn’t politics or ideology that drives me, it’s just dollars.
Let me give another example for you to chew on. Let’s say that we give you what you want. We get rid of the union and cut the total pay and benefits package to all unionized workers by 25%. That’s the promised land for you ET. No union and nothing more than average pay for city workers.
What have you accomplished? You’ve saved 600 million or so, avoided having to borrow that to cover the projected fiscal deficit for this year or eliminated the need to raise taxes to cover it. Congratulations.
What are you going to do now to raise the money to put into the maintainance, upkeep and repair of roads, sewers, subways etc that you have so frequently, and correctly, pointed out needs to be done?
There’s no union anymore to get it from. It’s gone. How much do you think we’ll need. A billion dollars? That would be a 10% tax hike. Okay with that or would you rather look at further cuts?
Well, with the union gone the only place left is management. As I said previously, we can save about a billion and a half by downsizing to roughly industry standards.
Sounds just about perfect to me although I do have to point out that my part of the plan saved 1.5 billion, your’s just a half billion. As I said ET, the big money to be saved is in management.
bob c – with the union gone, that doesn’t mean the workers are gone! And I think the savings will be more than your estimate. The savings have to include their benefits and pensions – they can purchase both via private investment, rather than having the city, for example, paying 100% of the cost of their benefits.
The work will still get done, but with less cost, less waste and more efficiency.
Again, I fully agree that management has to be cut – both in numbers and their ‘special perks’.
Ever since Ford was characterized by the MSM as fat, angry, and stupid, I knew that he would be the superior choice for mayor.