Rob Ford and the Power of Math

If there's been one consistent theme here for the last several years it is that the modern conservative movement is either powerfully stupid or achingly dishonest when it comes to economics. I actually think that it's a little of both. I think they actually believe their own nonsense, but they instinctively know that reasonable people everywhere mock their supply-side shitheadery, so they do everything they can to disguise it.

When they are throwing the government into endless debt and creating massive government the nu-conservative mantra is "deficits don't matter." But when they're out of power, deficits seem to matter very much. However, they don't matter enough that they'll propose cutting anything other than taxes in a significant way. Sure, they'll always name a few nickle and dime program cuts, but those are always symbolic and never amount to anything approaching serious money.

That wasn't always the case. Prior to 1980 in the United States (and 1993 in Canada), conservatives were the first people to block extravagant tax cuts because they knew that unpaid for tax cuts were the prime drivers in deficits. There was centuries of evidence that proved that debt was more dangerous to economic growth than high taxes were. Conservatives also knew that there was no cutting domestic program spending once it was in place because that spending tended to be very popular.

So Ronald Reagan and those inspired did the only thing they could to further their nonsensical economic agenda, they ignored history entirely and created massive deficits. And that's how old-school liberals like Jean Chretien and Bill Clinton turned out to be the last fiscal conservatives, certainly further to the economic right than Stephen Harper and George W. Bush ever were.

In large part, that's why I never trusted Rob Ford during his successful campaign for mayor. There was no end to the taxes that he said that he cut, but if you asked him what constituted the "gravy train" that he promised to stop, you only heard ridiculous platitudes about the fucking gardening at City Hall. In fact, he promised to maintain Toronto's program spending, particularly as it relates to the poor.

Ford also used the nu-conservative mantra that's guaranteed to make me bug-eyed with fury: "Toronto doesn't have a revenue problem, it has a spending problem."

As is true in the United States, that's horseshit. If you're in chronic deficit, but can't point to any structural program spending cuts that you'd like to make, then you most definitely have a revenue problem. I can't think of what else you'd call an inability to pay for things that you're unwilling or unable to give up. And that's a lot of things, teenagers, but conservative ain't one of them, since you ultimately wind up with the same result as you would with liberal spending policies.

I argued during the summer and fall that Ford would wind up going to Queen's Park for money and that he wouldn't get it because there's absolutely no logical reason for Dalton McGuinty to want to subsidize Mayor Ford's popularity. My local readers might have noticed that the premier is presiding over his own fiscal disaster, a deficit nearly twice as large as the one the socialist Rae government created in 1991.

Well, guess what Rob did this week.

Mayor Rob Ford, who campaigned on the city having a spending — not a revenue — problem, is asking the Ontario government for an injection of more than $150 million in the provincial budget expected in late March, the Star has learned.

In a four-page letter dated Jan. 25 sent by Ford to Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan, and obtained by the Star, the mayor asks for money for road construction and repair, public transit projects, a Fort York visitor centre and the renewal of programs to fund subsidized child care, housing and services for immigrants.

Ford, who last week passed a city budget that freezes taxes primarily by drawing on one-time surpluses and reserve funds, notes the city manages a child-care system that serves 53,402 children, and manages 24,000 child-care fee subsidies and a wait list with another 17,000 names.

The money quote in there is "last week passed a city budget that freezes taxes primarily by drawing on one-time surpluses and reserve funds". If Ford can't cut significantly in his first year, when one can safely assume that his popularity is at its peak, he isn't going to make real spending cuts at all. Whether that's because the cuts aren't there to begin with or because he isn't willing to pay the political capital required to make them is immaterial.

Look at LBJ's Civil Rights Act, Reagan's '81 tax cut, Clinton's first budget or ObamaCare as examples of how this works. If a leader doesn't get his banner issues passed in their first year, they don't get passed at all. That's textbook political history at work.

Hizzoner's not serious about "stopping the gravy train" and he never was. He just wants someone else to pay the fare. Actually, that's not even true. Since one in three Ontarians lives in Toronto, he wants us to pay for it through another level of government, yet still be able to say that he's frozen or cut taxes.

But Dalton - who's so evil that he practically glows in the dark, yet problematically is not retarded - is having none of it.

Premier Dalton McGuinty has essentially crumpled up Mayor Rob Ford’s provincial budget wish-list and thrown it in the garbage, saying: “There’s no more money.”

McGuinty made the comment Monday morning in reaction to a Star story revealing that Ford sent a letter to Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan in late January with a shopping list of funding requests ahead of the provincial budget expected in late March, the Star’s Rob Ferguson reports.

Ford asked for $150 million in specific projects, including roadwork, transit projects and increased funding for subsidies for child care for low-income families.

He also renewed his predecessor David Miller’s call for the province to pay half of the TTC’s $429 million annual operating costs, which boosts Ford’s funding request to more than $365 million.

McGuinty told reporters at a downtown hotel that it’s up to the City of Toronto to chart its own course, and the province’s first priority is reducing a deficit that is currently pegged at about $18.7 billion.

Ford has previously said the City of Toronto needs to get its fiscal house in order before going to other levels of government cap-in-hand. Although Ford is asking for more money, he did not build expectations of the funding into the 2011 city budget, a pressure tactic used by Ford’s predecessor David Miller.

Even if the money existed at Queen's Park, it wouldn't wind up in Ford's pocket because it isn't in McGuinty's political interest for it to be there. The premier is a dishonest hack with a long history of making promises that he can't keep, and he has to face the electorate this October. Luckily, the provincial Tories have a leader that's good for little but mockery, so Tim Hudak can be safely ignored in the general election.

That means that McGuinty can run against Ford. More importantly, Ford seems to be laying the groundwork for him to do just that. It's important to remember that in the "416" ridings that Ford won by over 50%, the Liberals only need to win a little over a third of the votes. All McGuinty has to do is keep the voters that were against Ford last October, and he maintains his ridings in the city. If he runs as being more fiscally conservative than Ford, he holds what he has in the 905 belt, and maybe even takes back Thornhill, which is why Peter Shurman was squealing to the Sun yesterday morning.

In the end, I don't think that the mayor is going to be able to get rid of David Miller's hated property transfer tax because the money won't be there and the province can't or won't subsidize it, and that's going to critically damage him. As my friend, the great Dr. Reverend, has repeatedly told me, "if conservatives can't cut my taxes, what are they good for?"

Ford, like the Republicans down south, has boxed himself in with his own stupid rhetoric. And ultimately, an ideological commitment to supply-side economics leaves you little choice. Liberals were never able to gut it as a practical theory, only the supply-siders themselves could. And they will. Just watch.