Comment 72257

By A Smith (anonymous) | Posted December 14, 2011 at 01:15:33 in reply to Comment 72242

According to the 2011 public accounts, federal debt charges were $30.87B, which works out to 1.79% of GDP.

In 1995, these charges were 5.19% of GDP and down to 3.80% in 2001.

The current federal debt is approximately $575 billion.

If you added another $300 billion to the debt, it would still bring debt charges only up to 2.72%. For that higher cost, each resident of Canada would get $8,670 in local transit funding.

If we apply that number to Hamilton, it would give the City of Hamilton $4.582B (528,502 residents).

For that amount of money, Hamilton could get 13.32km of subway (based on costs of $344M/km), which is about the distance from McMaster to Eastgate mall.

If the feds funded only the proposed LRT ($800M), this works out to $1,513/person. If this was applied nationwide, it would add $52.4B to the national debt.

Debt charges would go from 1.79%/GDP to 1.95%/GDP.

There may be reasons for not building transit, but money is not one of them.


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