Second stimulus package

[Jovial Monk]

Yup.

Consider, lots of kids are being taken out of private schools and put into public schools--do the states have the capacity to absorb all these new students? Fed govt needs to spend that money on schools just to absorb this overflow!

[Jovial Monk]

Turnbullhuffing and puffing about $42Bn yet:

I don’t understand why short memory Mal is concerned over a measly $42Bil when his side recklessly went on a $66bil spending spree from the budget 2003 to the lead up to the 2004 election without spending it on education or infrastructure.
Pull your togs up Malcolm!

So when I look at Australia today, I see a massive squandering of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to lay the foundations for sustained prosperity in the years ahead.

I am distressed by the reckless waste, the $66 billion spending spree between last year’s Budget and the election — and the rorting of hundreds of millions of dollars for marginal seat election campaigns by Liberal and National Party MPs. We can’t afford that when we face crises that result from chronic under-investment in education and infrastructure.

From a brilliant speech by Kim Beazley to the Melbourne Institute April 2005.

http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/sea ... mf6);rec=0;

[Jovial Monk]

From ABC website:

"Australia's employment outlook has taken another hit today, with a key private survey of job advertisements falling for a ninth consecutive month."

Nah, no need for a stimulus package!

[Ethnic]

Nah, no need for a stimulus package!

Yeah no need for massive debt and budget deficits that wil burden future generations for something that may not work. Yep I agree.

[Jovial Monk]

Now who is twisting whose words? When the economy recovers budget surpluses will pay off the debt. Then again, it will probably better to only slowly reduce the debt and spend money on infrastructure.

[JW Frogen]

Let us spend our children's future and they can pay off the debt.

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

[Jovial Monk]

Copied Leftofcentresalterego to here from Sandpit:

Sorry for referring across threads.

Celetina, nothing personal - but it is not helpfull for us to oppose the stimulus package.

I understand your concerns about future debt but economic stimuli are a tried and proven way of reducing the deletrious effects of a severe downturn in the economic cycle.

Pre-WW2, the recieved wisdom was that governments should not interfere in downturns, that the only thing to do was to let it run it's course, indeed to tighten governments belt while waiting for better times to return. The result was that they usually made the downturn worse or allowed it to get worse than it otherwise would have been.

That period in history was marked by savage cycles of boom and bust where millions of jobs and livelyhoods were routinely lost. So uncertain were times for the working class, that it prompted a certain Karl Marx to call for social revolution.

Eventually, JM Keynes figured out that the awfull effects of the economic cycle (on the working class in particular) could be greatly reduced by government stepping into the breach and filling in for private sector spending when it became deficient enough to threaten economic stability. This is the situation we are on the brink of right now. As Rupert Murdoch pointed out last week (not that I have any time for that fluffy bunny), Australia is one of the last places in the developed world for the effects of the crisis to reach.

The stimulus package will not fix the core problem - that is outside the control of any Australian government - but it will help buy us some time and help offset the jobs that will be lost.

[Postul8]

Lots of positive hyperbole in this thread, and I'm sure we all hope the almost-recession ends soon, but pretty graphs and quotes of seasonally adjusted statistics do not a recovery make, I'm afraid. Of course there was more spent at Xmas! It happens every year. Seasonally adjusting stats is just a bean-counters way of pulling interpretations from unfathomables. There's a graph I noticed Monk linked to. If you actually look at the real figures in the ABS and RBA archives, you'll see there's nothing spectacular. The "sharp uptick" mentioned in the linked blogpost to the seasonally adjusted graph line is just that. A seasonally adjusted uptick because it's Xmas. I'd be more interested in the author's explanation of the 'uptick' in July, or the 'downtick' in May 07. Maybe the last Howardian Budget giveaway? We all saw through that one.

It's the trendline that tells the tale, as with any series of long term statistical measurements. The trend barely flinched.

[Jovial Monk]

The first bonus is still delivering. Note the number of new fulltime jobs last month.

Again, the choice is not between a stimulus and no stimulus. The choice is between spending the stimulus money over 3 years OR 3 years of ever increasing unemployment, and the rapidly growing social security payments. Which leads to a bigger deficit?

And this one is not just handouts! There is the quick small infrastructure spending, esp on schools! Bigger infrastructure to come.

[Jovial Monk]

Retail sales $53.5b in December quarter

Figures just released show more than $53.5 billion was spent at retailers during the December quarter.

Abc Website, business news