Defund the budget

Have you had enough of taxation without representation?

Photo by PiggyBank on Unsplash

Political campaigns often come with big promises, and candidates get asked how they’ll make the budget work to deliver on them. Discussions about the validity of promises and their proposed financing are useful to a degree, but miss an extremely important point, namely, that the money does not belong to the politician, not does it belong to anyone in government. So why do we accept people throwing ideas around that involve spending the money we give them with no strings attached?

Money of course is an entirely fictional creation, whose value has been and continues to be manipulated by big players, even more so with the concentration of wealth we have today. Setting that aside, our current economic system recognizes money as something we earn, and something we spend for a service, a good, or a gift. And, in all cases but the paying of taxes, that system fully entitles us to consider what we earn as our money, and to use it for purchases only when we know exactly what we are paying for.

This isn’t the case with taxes. It’s true that we do receive value for our taxes - the money we hand over to the government each year ends up giving us many things. I enjoy a lot of benefits - I have a sidewalk and road outside my house that I didn’t have to build and I don’t have to personally maintain. I don’t get an electrical bill for the streetlights at night, and I can call the police in an emergency without having to give them a security fee. But whether we pay taxes is not optional. And we only receive the aforementioned benefits because the government agrees to pay for them. They can be cut or increased any time - a library branch cut here, a giant expressway renovation spend there. We can write letters or go to meetings to try and influence government decisions, but we ultimately we have no say in their final choice. And unlike in the rest of our economy, where we have the legal right to expect what we’ve paid for to be given to us, when it comes to taxes there is no accountability for the money we hand over except for the one day we vote every four years.

If I ever trusted our government to make the best choices with the money I handed over to them, I no longer do. I don’t believe we should be spending billions on road construction and maintenance, on tasers, cars, and guns for police, on boondoggle megaprojects or even on many of the well intentioned social services (like shelters) that some say do more harm than good. I feel a large amount of the money our government spends goes towards bureaucracy, waste, unfair contracts, and environmental degradation. Meanwhile I see important civic needs like affordable, frequent transit, safely designed streets, community pools, arenas, libraries and low cost high yield ecological improvements ignored in the budget process.

So how do we change this situation? Conventional right wing politicians promise to find efficiencies and cut costs, while their left wing counterparts suggest increasing taxes to pay for public needs. The former never seems to work since managing a 16 billion dollar budget from above is impossible for any mayor, or city council, to do, and inefficiencies, bias and even corruption automatically come with big projects and big institutions. And the latter strategy of raising taxes can can act as a perverse incentive on labour and property. Plus, while tax increases are meant to help those of lower incomes, complicated tax regimes inevitably seem to favour those on the highest end of the income scale.

Instead, I would like to see our budget process changed in two ways: increase service specific user fees, and allow people to have a say for every dollar they contribute.

Let’s look at user fees first. Instead of paying for city services like water, energy and waste through taxes, I suggest we price them at their true environmental cost (ie, the cost that ensures no destructive environmental impact and even repairs past damage) and we pay as we use them. We already do this to a certain degree, but I suspect we still greatly subsidize waste, water and energy consumption through our taxes, and I know that the user fees we do charge are far too low, given the overconsumption and waste in most households, especially higher income ones. Fees linked to usage would offer residents complete control over how much they pay, unlike taxes, which are solely determined by the government.

Secondly, let’s give people the final say in what they pay for. In the first part of this essay I listed the things I don’t want to pay for, and the things I do. Right now, if I were elected mayor, and if I could find a majority of councillors who agreed with me, we could allocate the budget according to my priorities. But, while I think my priorities are good ones, I don’t actually think letting me have the entire say for 3 million people is the way forward. I think we all should have the opportunity to choose. The specifics of how to accomplish that would need to be developed by us together as a city. We could do it by city-wide referenda. We could do it by community voting blocks, or look to places like Porto Alegre in Brazil, where the concept of participatory budgeting arose - which I also wrote about in my last campaign.

He Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune

Or we could break it down even smaller (more in line with my Anarcho Queen vision) and raise and spend money collectively only through neighbourhood consensus. To enable good budget decision making by residents would require complete accounting transparency and massive decentralization of decision making. But allowing people the choice of what to pay for and how much - while giving them the knowledge of what it costs to provide services we take for granted - could open up a new world of civic innovation.

It’s no easy feat to run a city the size of ours. And by tinkering with the way we do things at the top I question whether we’ll be able to accomplish the changes I’d like to see. But if we trust residents and a friendly universe, which I do, opening up decisions on our city budget creates the potential for the kind of beautiful transformation we can all be a part of.