You may think you can’t afford to have children unless you work longer hours or take a second job. So imagine I told you of a financing plan that could let you afford kids without the need to increase your income. Just borrow all the money you need to raise them, for food, clothes, hockey registrations, extra bedrooms, university tuition.

Under this plan, when your children grow up and get jobs, their income will help your family pay back the loan. Their income, which your family wouldn’t have if you didn’t invest in having kids, will settle the debt so you don’t have to increase your own income or cut back on expenditures today.

Would you think that plan made sense?

It’s similar in many ways to how John Tory proposes to pay for transit: his Tax Increment Financing plan borrows money to build, and promises to pay it back using the property taxes from new developments along the line, developments that may not otherwise be built. Tory suggests this avoids a tough choice: “We’re going to finance SmartTrack without increasing property taxes,” he has said, repeatedly.

A lot of excellent analysis—including a piece in the Star Sunday by Daniel Dale—has focused on the question of whether the plan will work to generate the $2.5 billion Tory says he needs it to. Much of that analysis, as Dale’s did, leads to the conclusion that it’s possible, but there are good reasons to doubt it. But I think there’s a bigger problem here. Even if TIF “works,” it won’t relieve us of the need to raise taxes to pay these bills.

Let’s return to my child-financing plan to see why: many people might ask, What if my kids are unemployed all their lives? What if their incomes are not high enough to cover the debt? What if, God forbid, something happens to them and they don’t live long enough to pay it all back?

These are the kinds of questions we’ve been asking about Tory’s plan about whether enough new money will materialize in TIF zones to pay back the debt. And those are valid questions.

But what if it does work?

Let’s say your children grow up to be productive employees with enough income to cover all the debt you incurred. There’s still a problem, which is that usually the income those adult children earn will be spent paying for the expenses of their adult lives: they’ll need clothes and cars and food and places to live, and they may have children of their own to pay for. They’ll either need to increase their own incomes to make up the difference, or cut their expenses to the bone and live like hermits to pay off the debt you saddled them with.

That’s essentially the problem embedded in TIF. New developments don’t just generate new tax revenue for the city, they also generate new costs. Even if Tory’s growth projections come true, we’ll still need to pay for the things that property taxes from those new buildings usually fund, things the residents and employees of those new buildings need: libraries, roads, policing, buses, and so on.

So if, when Tory’s transit loans come due, we have experienced an explosion of growth along his SmartTrack lines that generates enough money to pay the loans, and we’ve earmarked it to pay those loans, how will we find the money to provide the infrastructure and services those taxes would normally pay for?

We’ll raise taxes across the city, or slash services, to make up the difference.

My child-financing proposal might let you pretend for a while that there’s a magical way to get things without paying for them. But it wouldn’t save your family the need to generate income to pay for the expenses you incur. It would just spend part of your family’s future income now, and pass the tough reckoning with how to handle the bills on to your kids.

Tory’s TIF proposal does the same for the future residents of Toronto. They’ll need to pay for their own expenses in addition to whatever debts they inherit from us. They’ll do it by increasing taxes. The hope, I guess, is that by then politicians will have developed the backbone to be upfront about it.

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