Miller time - unfortunately

David Miller got his new taxes yesterday.

With a lot of trade unionists and other supporters filling the galleries to give the pro mayor side some spine, the land transfer and car taxes went through.

Someone was quoted in the Toronto Star as asking why he should have to pay car taxes so that peoiple in the outlying areas can come in to Toronto for free and clog our roads? Damn good question and when more people start asking it Miller is going to look ridiculous, as will his supporters.

It's the wrong answer because the right questions were not asked. The question really was two-fold: how to generate pennies for the pot and how to make sure you hit fairly those taking advantage of being able to drive in downtown Toronto. Fine, make every Torontonian pay a car tax. But make every car in downtown Toronto with Ontario plates, be required to display a sticker on their bumper that they get when they pay the same $60 as the rest of us. If you don't want to drive in Toronto, you don't need the sticker, but if you're caught driving in a car in the city without the sticker the fine is $150. Take your choice.

So now, you generate a lot more money or you encourage a huge increase in mass transit, which generates revenues in another stream. Either way the city wins.

It seems to me no one down in the concrete bunker can think. The right wing morons, led by head moron Rob Ford, had no ideas at all except to cut programs. What I like about right wing conservatives is their rich imagination, their abundance of policies to make life better for everyone. Like the NDP under Hampton, they haven't had an original idea since 1944.

Worse, Royce James, the Star columnist, went on another anti Miller rant and then criticized the council for not going through the cosmetic process of cutting their own budgets by 10%. James thinks the appearance of a so-called partial solution is just as good as the real thing, because the optics, don't you know, would make citizens feel better. No wonder we get lousy work out of city council - they simply meet the standards of a lousy columnist who wouldn't know a good idea if it bit him in the ass and spends far too much time pursuing ideas not worth a pauper's pot of piss. And he passes muster with the Star as a city columnist. Saints preserve us.

While we're at it - did anyone think of a room tax on hotels. I've been in a number of American cities recently, from one coast to the other, and all ding tourists at least $2 a night and sometimes quite a bit more. Does council have the right to levy such a tax? If not, why not?