Infrastructure maintenance, billion-dollar tax savings, and Accounting 101 | #TOpoli

So this happened this morning.
Water main let go just around the corner from my house. My kid’s school bus was late getting here to pick her up, and couldn’t drop her off in the afternoon; I had to go meet the bus a couple of blocks away.
Yeah, yeah, I know. First world problems. I’m not trolling for sympathy (well, maybe not exclusively — ed.), but I’m raising it in the context of a certain claim going ’round about saving taxpayers a billion dollars.

I’m not an accountant, but yeah, I suppose if you don’t spend money on maintenance, upkeep, or, you know, TAKING CARE OF STUFF, then I guess you could argue that you’re saving money by not spending it. Only problem is … well, see above.
So yeah, maybe it does save money in some reality-free bubble somewhere when you don’t spend money on infrastructure maintenance. But then the kind of people who buy into that kind of reasoning are probably rolling around in the schadenfreude right now because this is happening downtown.
Hey, nobody said this had to be logically coherent.
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