Comment 53977

By Undustrial (registered) - website | Posted December 29, 2010 at 13:44:36

The overall message is that in Hamilton you cannot do business. Plain and simple.

The message is plain and simple, folks. If we do not grant a small number of influential businesspeople everything they ask for, we are destined for nothing but permanent poverty.

This tripe gets peddled every time somebody wants tens or hundreds of millions of our dollars. It grossly oversimplifies issues of poverty, as if poverty is a result of a lack of highways, stadia and aerotropoli. It completely ignores history - as our city's leadership does have a long history of going along with these schemes, and none so far have brought the promised benefits. Most of all, it makes a blatantly mathematically incorrect argument: that taking more money from people who don't have much and giving it to people who have far more is the exact opposite of "dealing with the problems of poverty".

Just because somebody, somewhere, within city limits, is making money, doesn't mean that anybody else is benefiting. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don't - it's not a claim that can be made without evidence. Awarding Bob Young control over and revenues from everything near the stadium will only increase the amount of money which flows upward. Decisions like locating far from urban centres and charging high parking costs do nothing to benefit us. They simply create massive wastes of resources (space, gas, time) in ways which can be capitalized upon by Bob Young. And while they'll certainly be calculated as "economic growth" rather than costs, that's only going to further skew these numbers and decisions.

Net, not gross, value, folks.

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