Could Rob Ford end up presiding over a “socialist” budget?

By now, even casual observers of city hall will have noticed that the 2012 budget is not gliding through council the way Rob Ford might have hoped. As the proposed budget has moved through various committees, it’s slowly turned from a model of Ford’s brand of fiscal responsibility into—well, we’ll let you know when the budget debate wraps up (with councillors scrambling to save programs and services from the axe, things are in flux). As for the implications for Ford, municipal affairs blogger Matt Elliott lays out the stakes like this: the mayor has branded David Miller and the councillors who supported him as socialists. At the same time, Ford has been bragging that his proposed budget—the one that’s being slowly picked away—features an unprecedented decrease in spending from the previous year. But last-minute changes mean the gap between 2012 and 2011 is rapidly shrinking. Or, to put things in more Fordian terms, we’re slowly creeping from responsible spending to something he might have once called socialist. Oh, the ironies of city hall. Read the entire story [Ford For Toronto] »