Guest Post

GAnonymous has left a new comment on your post "Time Goes By In A Flash": 


It was just announced that Canada's inflation rate for January was up by only one percent from January of last year. This was a huge deviation from the expected one and one half percent that economists had forecast.

The culprit of the moment is the fall in gas prices, and related fossil fuel items.

Low inflation could lead to deflation, where prices and costs decline, and eventually even salaries and wages.

How to fight deflation? Look at Japan for over 20 years and they haven't overcome deflation.

Most western industrialized countries are trying to keep deflation at bay by central bankers reducing interest rates. This is supposed to entice companies into borrowing to invest in new plants, thereby 
creating new jobs. We have been living with these for six years.

But this is not happening. Corporate profits are at record highs as a result of severe cost cutting, sometimes even as a result of staff layoffs.

Apple recently borrowed $5 billion for five years at an interest rate of 0.7%. There are hundreds of billions of dollars in corporate treasuries, often borrowed, even though not needed, simply because the cost was so low.

There are now half a dozen European countries, including Germany, that are charging customers to keep their money in the bank; a so called negative interest rate.

But I don't see any of this reflected in our community, where this week's Auroran features an article that says the property tax rate for 2015 is now down to a proposed 5.66%. This follows fine tuning the Central York Fire Services request that would have seen a tax increase of 6.1%.

How is it that the country's inflation rate of 1%, and a great concern at that, can exist simultaneously with Aurora property tax payers who are looking at more than five times that?


Municipal government is obviously too expensive and its managers, both staff and elected members, are simply not doing everything necessary to contain costs, even if some services have to suffer.

Instead of monotonous discussion about clear garbage bags, why not cut collection days by fifty percent, or some similar service reduction.

By all means, explain it to the people, but then just go ahead and do it, and they might actually say thank you
Posted by Anonymous to  Our Town and Its Business at 27 February 2015 at 21:32