Get your red-hot budget tips here!

[Jovial Monk]

And by removing the middleclass welfare and investing in education and productive infrastructure the debt will be repaid in a few years, not intergenerational debt. This intergenerational debt claptrap is just emotional rubbish from those who can't balance their chequebook.

[Leftofcentresalterego]

As I said before Mantra, the money for the deficit does not have to be found anywhere. The debt voluntarily undertaken by bond issuance is something separate (though related by policy – interest rate targeting).

Think hard and then tell me where you think Australian dollars come from. If no one can create them, how did they get here? Did the Almighty make them from the dust of the ground? And if no one can make them, how has the supply grown as the country has grown? We are running a $1 trillion economy. Go back to say, 1970 and see what size it was then. How is it that there are more Australian dollars now then there were then? Did we get them from trade? Did other countries print their own Australian dollars and buy our dirt and farm produce with them? If no one can produce them, there would be a fixed, unchanging supply, no?

Can you accept that there is a currency monopolist (the federal government) who is empowered to create Australian dollars?

That there can be no NET addition to the absolute sum of Australian dollars in existence until the Australian federal government spends more than it taxes (runs a deficit)?

That we ran deficits for many years at a stretch coupled with strong economic growth, relatively low inflation and very low unemployment?

That there is ZERO need for the government to abolish the army, the aged pension or any other kind of it’s own domestic spending in order to pay for anything in Australian dollars since it is the only legitimate source of Australian dollars and may create them as it sees fit.

That policy choices are shaped to a fair extent by public opinion, irrespective of whether or not a widely held opinion is correct – if I believed that government deficit spending was wasting my money and would burden my children with debt (it does neither) then I would vote them out at the next election <we would all be happier if the government did not publish it’s accounts>

That running a deficit when economic growth is anything other than very strong (it may be less than 1% of GDP) is good and that trying to run a surplus budget when we are in recession would reduce the economy to rubble.

[Jovial Monk]

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009 ... 565983.htm

[Auzgurl]

11 May 2009 6:52:57am

If the Howard Party had not blown 94% of the mining boom windfall in their last term in office ($314 billion), leaving the coffers practically empty, the government right now would be in a more flexible position to meet the downturn.

This comment from that article..

Thats a staggering amount of money that those f**kers wasted.

[Jovial Monk]

Yeah. Howard got a scare in 1998 when the Fibs/Nuts only got 48.x% of the vote. So he decided to buy elections from then on. Even in his 2007 campaign launch speech he was spending $2Bn a second!

Altogether, Howard wasted $390Bn. A truly staggering number and it is on top of the normal govt spending.

Swan should say tomorrow, fuck the tax cuts, top tax rate is raised and the threshhold for it lowered--these are the people who benefitted from all the Howard tax cuts so they can damn well suffer a bit now and do their bit to reduce the defict! And cut the huge amounts going to elite private schools, all schools should receive a similar subsidy per student.

[Jovial Monk]

Sens Coonan, Joyce & Abetz must share a set of about 10 neurons. Here is the idiot Coonan on Howard's reckless spending:

Opposition finance spokeswoman Helen Coonan said: "What the Howard government did was leave the Future Fund, billions in the education fund, the communications fund, big amounts of money that the Labor Government has gratefully received and are now tipping into, what they will probably announce tomorrow night, as their infrastructure spending.

So out of about $400Bn boom revenue the Fibs saved FF 20Bn, Education Fund, 5Bn and Rural Communication Fund $2bn, about $27Bn out of $400Bn, way under 10%

Nah, they didn't spend like drunken sailors, much!

[Hebe]

Sens Coonan, Joyce & Abetz must share a set of about 10 neurons.

Well, Abetz has about 1, so 4.5 each for the others.

[Jovial Monk]

Now now that's no way to speak about one of your State's representatives

My vision of the three thickos is they are somehow networked and 'surplus' neurons flow from two of them towards the whichever member of the troika of thickness is being mentally challenged, say by having to tie up their shoelaces, and so sometimes one of the three will look he has all the brain power of a flock of chickens.

I think the Coonan is the one most often draining those surplus neurons

[Jovial Monk]

And a pre-budget Essential Research poll shows support for the government lifting after a minor temporary blip even tho most seem to think the budget will be bad for them personally.


http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/fi ... 110509.pdf

[Jovial Monk]

THE forecast jobless rate would be as high as 10 per cent without the stimulus measures the Government has put in place according to Treasury advice, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says.

The advice, to be published in the Budget which will be unveiled tomorrow night, says the nearly $90 billion in stimulus spending has helped to reduce unemployment queues, Mr Rudd said.

"This Treasury advice finds that if the Government had done nothing, national unemployment in Australia would have been forecast to reach 10 per cent," he said.

http://www.news.com.au/adelaidenow/stor ... 62,00.html