Raise the Hammer

Highwater, unlike yourself, I feel no need to be part of an ineffectual group of community activists, I simply want to get my message out. RTH allows me to do this, so why would I waste my time reinventing the wheel?

Furthermore, you're likely just sour because tax rates ARE continuing to fall, while your left wing causes are going nowhere. No major cycling improvements, no LRT, no reduction in bog box stores, no freezing of transit fares.

As far as my recommendation to Grassroots, I am just asking him/her to do what he/she expects others to do, pay people a living wage. The equivalent to my position would be to ask me to lower my tax rate. Since I don't charge people taxes, I have already accomplished that goal.

One last thing, why is it that you, who owns a business, has no interest in lowering their tax bill? If commercial tax rates were brought down to Burlington levels, you could reduce the prices of your goods and services, increase your sales, expand your business, hire more people and even pay higher wages. This would add to the quality of the neighbourhood, which in turn would raise property values and otherwise make the city a better, more prosperous place to live.

Ryan has told all you left wingers many times before, if you want more of something, you tax it less. If the goal is to have more wealth in this community, we need to keep reducing tax rates on wealth gains from property. Currently the City of Hamilton taxes each new dollar in assessed property wealth at 1.59% for residential, 4.33% for commercial and 6.26% for industrial.

In contrast, Burlington, a community where wealth is allowed to be reinvested by the smart people who earn it and not spent on unprofitable government schemes, only charges 1.076% for residential, 2.46% for commercial and 3.80% for industrial property.

That is the major difference between our two cities. Hamilton likes to punish people who create wealth, Burlington doesn't.

The bottom line is this, if we want more wealth in this community, we need to stop punishing people who create it. The only way to do this is to lower TAX RATES on each dollar of assessed property value. That should be the major goal of the city and anything that threatens this goal should be cast aside until our tax rates match our GTA neighbours.