When treasurer Josh Frydenberg abandoned the Tony Abbott mantra that “you can’t fix the economy unless you fix the budget,” it was clear that something within the mindset of the treasurer and the government, had changed. They realised that the reverse was true.
No longer do they believe that debt is a disaster, or that deficits are bad. Not now, under the current Covid climate. Funny how things you do for the sake of expediency and political advantage, finally catch up with you.
Long gone is the soft target of Labor’s predilection for high spending there to exploit. Not even the Murdoch press can play with that one anymore. Covid has blown that one right out of the window.
No longer will the mantra, “how are you going to pay for it,” work either. Funny how both the conservative press and the ABC are now running spending stories without referring to the levels of sustainable debt.
Economic gurus everywhere are now reviewing and revising their reporting strategies to accommodate the changed circumstances that reflect more closely the MMT reality of sovereign debt…that it isn’t debt at all!
The government balances its books by issuing bonds to cover spending that exceeds taxation revenues, but knows all too well, that those bond sales are no more than a smokescreen to hide the fact that the Reserve Bank provides the money for all government spending, regardless of the outcome of any bond sale. It simply creates the money out of thin air.
There is no difference between a $1 trillion debt and a $2 trillion debt. It’s what you spend it on, that matters.
Now, some in the press, have woken up to that reality too. So, what is the government doing now? They are embracing the reality that full employment is the key to a successful economy. Who would have thought?
Up until now, the thought has been that a certain level of unemployment was necessary to combat inflation. Not anymore. Employment is now the key driver.
Get people back to work, manufacturing, producing, distributing, delivering, servicing, and voilà! No longer does one need to worry about balancing a budget. Over time, that will happen automatically. Who would have thought?
For a government who won an election in 2013 on the flimsy fantasy of a “debt and deficit disaster,” this 180-degree turnaround seems to have been achieved without a scintilla of a backlash. What a stroke of good fortune that has been.
‘’How good is that’,” we could imagine the PM, Scott Morrison saying to his cabinet as they engineered the dismantling of the job keeper program.
There is a certain irony here, that journalists are struggling to address because in doing so, they reveal their own shortcomings.
Notwithstanding the insensitivity the government has shown towards the needs of various sectors within the national framework, they are now happily prepared to dole out the dollars to those very sectors they despise, knowing full well that their hypocrisy in a Covid-conscious electorate, will go unnoticed.
How good is that? And it is all because the conservative side in the political arena has adopted the “don’t worry about the debt” mentality. Why have they done this?
Because they now realise that it is not real debt!
The problem for Labor in this otherwise snippet of good news, is that those who would most likely change their vote and punish the government for their dishonesty, are currently so self-obsessed with their larger bank accounts and wondering what to spend it on, that they are blind to this fundamental policy reversal, or couldn’t care about it anyway.
Comment bon est ca?
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