You asked me for ways to save money and I told you. You just don't like the answers.
Let's look at it a different way.......
Let's compare Chicago and Toronto. Both are approximately the same size cities, large urban centers. Arguable which is a better town. (I'd say Toronto, but my buddy On the Bottom would argue Chicago because it's home to so many fortune 500 companies.)
Toronto Budget = 14.4 billion Canadian dollars
Chicago Budget = 8.7 billion American dollars (which up until a year or so ago had been more or less the same.)
Toronto number of municipal employees = 55,000 (seriously)
Chicago number of municipal employees = 32,000
Simply put, too many workers.
I've said it before, I'll say it again. I don't begrudge them their salaries. You won't ever find me saying that. There's just way too many City of Toronto employees. You could lay off 20 percent of them and your average person would never even notice the difference.
Private sector companies lay off 10% of staff and no-one blinks an eye. If the city were to lay off 10% of staff, Lake Ontario would flood from all the tears.
Actually I asked you to name the services we should do without. But you're right, I don't like your ideas. As I said, you haven't named services to cut. In fact, you want them preserved for the taxpaying tightwads but delivered by workers you'd push closer to poverty levels. And you even want those workers prevented from bargaining for their wages.
You seem to have forgotten where you opened : "We have far too many government services…" You have yet to name one superfluous one, never mind many. And I've already pointed out that many of us have already noticed the unfilled staff jobs, and the declining productivity that has resulted, and that's without your systematic double decimation, just Ford's haphazard version. I'm sure there are superfluous workers, who superfluous managers are too incompetent to fire. Both find hidey-holes in every organization, I'll bet you could name a couple in your own shop. But on simple-minded 20% cuts as a solution you are simply wrong, as was Rob and innumerable pols before him. They make things worse, not better.
As to comparing apples and oranges, Chicago's crime and murder rates, their school ratings, poverty levels, social and race problems, are also very unlike Toronto's, and that's far from saying all else is the same.
None of this is to say that we cannot do things better and spend less, but that needs hard work from competent, dedicated people working full-time at it, not pat answers tossed off in a couple of sentences by spectators, or even worse by simpleton pols applying them across a complex, unamalgamated city as if it was a middle-school playground.
Look where switching the the boorish version of pol for the smoothie has gotten us so far.
Enough digression: Back to the topic at hand. While we wait for the year or two or six of disruptions to bring about all your savings — can we please build the DRL with them — we're still broke. Taking money from guys who can't manage to keep their cars under the posted limits might make the roads safer and most definitely will improve the balance sheet a bit. Where's the downside?
