John Howard, snout firmly and deeply in the trough!

[Jovial Monk]

Yap yap yap yip!

[punk]

Yap yap yap yip!

keep ur bestial love talk for ur own swamp dog fucker

[Jovial Monk]

Along comes an even smaller, more yappy yapper!

[Jovial Monk]

The OO tries to be fair:

Deficit masked by coal, iron ore

AS mortgage rates rise further next year, should home borrowers blame the greedy banks or Labor's lack of budget discipline?

The answer is that the budget must cop some of the blame.

Wayne Swan's mid-year "fiscal reprioritisation" ensures the election campaign and the subsequent horse-trading don't worsen the budget bottom line, which clings to the projected 2012-13 surplus.

In terms of managing the economy, that's a big improvement on the spending increases and tax cuts under John Howard and Peter Costello that added fuel to the first China-propelled mining boom.

The Treasurer and new Finance Minister Penny Wong point out that Labor is committed to a tight 2 per cent real spending growth cap until the budget is solidly in surplus.

Labor is finding that it's much easier to throw borrowed money at voters to ward off a global recession than to take it away to make room for Australia's once-in-a-century mining boom.

The problem is that the Howard-Costello spending spree and Labor's overdone budget stimulus have produced a sizeable "structural deficit" that is masked by today's sky-high iron ore and coal prices. We are spending a temporary revenue bonanza that we should be saving.[My emphasis]

Both Treasury and Finance have warned Swan and Wong they should be getting back to surplus much more aggressively to share the policy burden of containing the mining boom.

The mid-year review catches up with the Reserve Bank in recognising the risks that this mining development boom will overheat the economy, forecasting that the jobless rate will fall to 4.5 per cent next financial year.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/busines ... 5950412402

In what way the stimulus was overdone is not explained, I think Rudd/Swan/Gillard/Tanner got it exactly right, low unemployment, despite the mining industry firing tens of thousands of workers and yet low inflation—the RBA did not say inflation was the reason for its (wrong) decision to kike rates on Melbourne Cup day.

Instead, the OO and the RBA misjudged the second mining boom: unlike the first one we do not have a government:

1. Feeding the boom via tax cuts and pork barreling—effectively H&C did not have surpluses because they spent them!

2. Telling everyone to go out and borrow and max out the credit card

The world now is very different to what it was pre-2008! The US/UK/Europe and even China are pursuing the mistaken policy of austerity. This second mining boom therefor will be different to the first, with a global Depression about to hit.