Winter Walking and Cycling

[ijmorlan]

It's amazing how this one issue is such a battle to discuss or push through, but we literally don't question the other thousands of things we pay taxes for.  Why?

Because it would be an increase in taxes.

Tax increases (even if they provide additional services) and service reductions (even if they reduce taxes) always cause pushback.

My point is that it’s not really a tax increase. Well, OK, if you count as a “tax” only the money the property owner is required to pay to the City, fine, it’s a tax increase. But right now the property owner’s obligation to the City consists of paying property taxes and shovelling the sidewalk:

$t + $s

Where $s is the money value expended to shovel the sidewalk for an entire winter. The proposal on the table is, roughly speaking, to replace this obligation with a money-only obligation:

$t + $30

($30 roughly based on a round-number version of numbers that have appeared in relevant studies of the cost of municipal sidewalk clearing)

Anybody for whom $s > $30 will see this as a reduction in their city burden. And I claim this is pretty much everybody; even for people earning minimum wage they’ll make the $30 in just a couple of hours; when was the last winter you could spend less than 2 hours over the whole winter shovelling the sidewalk?

This is what I mean when I say this is a tax reduction. And I do think it should be sold as a reduction in total burden on the property owner. This is also why I consider most opposition to be pretty much invalid. If I think we should have more skating rinks (for example) and somebody disagrees, I can’t really say their opinion is “invalid”; it’s perfectly legitimate to think that the cost of additional skating rinks is not something we should all be paying for. But it’s not valid to complain that something is too expensive when it reduces the (total) cost.

Having said all this, you’re fundamentally right. Politicians are rightly afraid of being seen as tax-increasers, no matter how meritorious the proposed spending.