Recently, I heard various people jawing on the radio about taxes needing to head up. Also things like Translink fares. ‘It’s so tight, we’re cash strapped at every level’ they said. Now, I’m a lefty. Not allergic to taxation for public service. However, these days…  

Well, maybe an example is best. I heard recently that Translink is going to phase in yet another new technology for fare collection, because updating the buses, and installing closed circuit cameras/microphones, and building a RAV line, and putting in new fare boxes, and automating the stops with Next To Arrive signs, and putting text-this-stop numbers in with the back end infrastructure/IT to service it,  and adding website intelligence engines, and replacing the stop shelters, and painting the ones in the West End pink – well, that wasn’t enough messing around to do in a short time span. Nope.  

To which I thought, Translink, if you spend like a shopoholic on a bender on every bit of tech that comes your way, I think I may have found your problem staying out of the red. You’re upgrading too fucking much. 60 years ago: bus, driver, passengers. A to B. Then technology happened, and you somehow decided being from the FEE-YOU-TCHURE was essential. MUST BE WORLD CLASS!

 When the Transit Riders Union says “don’t hike fares anymore”, please remember that cash strapped Vancouverites, and not Olympic spectators or well heeled Asian touristas make the core of your ridership. Maybe your core transit users can’t afford every bell and whistle you stumble upon and think is nifty. We’re not New York, peeps. We’re poorer than New York. We need buses moving semi-predictably and with fairly high frequency on the major arteries, and possibly the people you’ve already got hanging around checking tickets to help direct people. Plus Vancouverites will have to be a little better at helping the well heeled Asian tourista with a question. Finis.

The thing is, I don’t expect a whole hell of a lot from *public* transit other than it be affordable to the public and move people from A to B and then back again. Before private companies got involved with their relentless push to WORLD CLASS! and HIGHER PRICE POINT!, Comrade Bus drove people from A to B like the totally lame ass prole thing it was. And you often had a place to sit. Ahem. Now that buses have gone bougie, we’re screwed, because you want people to pay bougie rates.

Anyway.

I went and checked our house’s current assessment for tax purposes. We’re looking at a rent multiple – if my guess as to my neighbour’s rent is correct – of about 365.5. Generally, that’s around 200 and 250 in Vancouver. If Vancouver starts looking at more traditional rent to ownership valuations, there’s going to be a decrease in incoming revenues to City Hall.

The question I have is, if stuff is so tight now during the fat years, what the heck is going to happen to this municipality if there is a jolt to the market? If people are eating depreciation of their homes, are they going to support municipal increases in the percentage rates? I don’t think that’s going to go over well to a generation of folks working their hardest already in a city with a steep cost of living.

We’re drinking more, s’posedly. Seems about right. Pass the rum.

Of course, they’re thinking of raising taxes there, too. 

Speaking of which: I saw two seperate news articles in a fairly short period. 1) Some jurisdiction was complaining about their drinking culture being a cost for health care – I think the UK. 2) The Alzheimer’s Society – or some other similar society – determined that forms of dementia are going to be near catastrophic to the health care system as Boomers get older. Quoth the rep: “Age is the single biggest factor in getting this disease”.

Purely pragmatically, I’m not sure I believe that being healthy and fading over a longer time is a bigger cost to health care than dropping young due to being unhealthy. Massive coronaries and liver failure and aggressive untreatable cancers of the lung: cheaper! (Of course, fast death is not guaranteed by smoking, lard, and moonshine – even if cost were the only way to evaluate human health outcomes.)

I love my Grandpa and am glad for every year of his life. I think his life was worth living. But, if we’re measuring in dollars, the fact that he was taken out by congestive heart failure is preferable to him living in care (which was getting increasingly likely), and the fact that he lived those last 10 years on a variety of medications and interventions cost a lot more than if he’d been less careful and had simply eaten his butter sandwiches and been taken out by the last major heart event. Which, according to his docs, would have happened if he’d been less healthy overall. 

Of course, anecdata and five bucks will buy you a latte, but is he an outlier? I doubt it.

Mainly I am again getting sick of valuing everything about people and their health and lives in terms of cost to health care. It’s sloppy panicked moralizing to a complex technological and social situation. I don’t know what the answer is, but I’m pretty sure asking people to stay healthy isn’t going to do much in the long run.

I think I’m mainly suspicious it’s a class based distancing technique - the working poor who get sick with different sorts of illnesses are being squinted at as those undeserving of the lifeboats. I think lots of this is prejudice writ backwards. Stress and the human animal, certain genetic types carrying certain weaknesses…

But even if that’s suspicion unfounded, in our current economic system the optimal situation for the taxpayer or HMO bottom line is for people to live through  their highest wage earning years with minimal intervention and then die suddenly of massive whatever before they retire. The earn and burn plan. Developing countries minus infant mortality. Obviously ridiculous.

We’re going to have to have painful discussions about health care as the Boomers age. What gets paid for in medicine. Who looks after whom. When we let people go.  I think we may have a pharmaceutical reckoning – drugs that will save but that no one except the richest can afford – and I think that’s going to be an issue. I believe in Canada’s health care system – but I am aware that, like Translink, technology is making a prole system into a bougie one. And that costs money we don’t, in the aggregate, have anymore.