If you’ve been reading me religiously…
That’s a really funny term when I think about it… Shouldn’t it be “regularly”? After all, doesn’t “religiously” mean without question?
Oh, it’s all ok. I looked it up and it does have the meaning of “with consistent and conscientious regularity”…
Anyway, if you’ve been reading me “with consistent and conscientious regularity”… or religiously… whichever, you’ll know by now that you should never doubt me. Remember when I first predicted a surplus?
No?
Ok, I don’t actually remember either but it was several months ago. And even if we can’t find the first mention, I told you about it a week or so before the Budget and before everyone else jumped on the bandwagon.
This is all just gloating and I guess some people would like me to stop and answer the question:
What’s so good about a surplus?
Which, I will agree, is a good question. A damned, fine question.
Well, it’s like this. We have inflation and during times of inflation anything that sucks money out of the economy is meant to be good at taming inflation…
In theory…
The trouble with Economics is that it’s a bit like Psychology and by that I simply mean that it’s not like Science or Maths… It’s more like English where you can interpret a poem any way you like as long as it’s not the wrong way…
Which, is sort of what I’m saying about Economics…
In order to be an economist you have to agree with all the people setting your exam papers until you’ve earned you’re right to be as wrong as all the other economists…
At this point, I could start talking about the debates between Keynesian followers and the followers of Milton Friedman but that would just be the sort of distraction that leads the one person still reading after two more paragraphs to wonder why there isn’t a “My Budget Rules” or “MasterAccountant” equivalent of those cooking shows. Yes, that person would speculate, they could not only discuss the relative merits of double-entry accounting, but in the special challenge section they could come up with creative ways to cook the books… And the best accountant gets to spend a week at the Cayman Islands where they can meet their perfect match and…
Anyway… Look, I get it.
This Budget has upset a lot of people…
Of course it’s outrageous that people are below the poverty line.
However, politically, there’s no way out with that one. If the government were to adopt the recommendations and raise the rate, we’d have even more screaming about the alleged inflationary effect of the Budget which is the consensus opinion of all those economists apart from those who can be ignored because they’d upset the consensus and the interviewer wouldn’t be able to say that economists are all saying that a Budget surplus is inflationary when any simple textbook would tell you otherwise. (Of course, a deficit isn’t necessarily inflationary, nor is a surplus deflationary; it depends what’s spent where!)
And, politically, we’d have even more people – like Peta Credlin – asserting that we’re giving money to “bludgers” while ordinary people get nothing, as well as people on social media telling us that they have no reason to keep working when they could quit their $100k plus job and live in luxury on unemployment benefits now that the extra $40 a fortnight could enable them to buy a coffee every second day.
But notwithstanding the politics of the thing, I’d have to say that it’s strange that people went from saying before the Budget that it was outrageous that people under 55 weren’t going to get any increase to being even more outraged that it was only about $3 a day. When you say that it only buy a loaf of bread, it’s quite clear that you aren’t the one who can’t afford the loaf of bread!
Ok, it’s true that the increase will be quickly swallowed up by rising prices so stop yelling at ME! I’m not the one who chose the amount and I’m certainly not going to complain about rising taxes if they introduce a rate closer to the poverty line, or better yet a Universal Basic Income, eliminating the need for all time and money checking up to see that people are really miserable while being unemployed and if they’re not, what can we do about it?
Listening to the budget reply from Peter Dutton, I did have the strange experience of thinking that’s a good idea when he spoke about allowing the unemployed to earn more before they lost any payment. I can see several pluses to this idea, but the strangeness of the experience quickly disappeared when he explained that this was INSTEAD of the $40 increase. Yep, you can get even more, you lucky soul, by working ten hours or so hours a fortnight. All you need to do is find an employer who wants you for a small amount of time and if you can do that it’s all fine but if you can’t, you don’t deserve any increase and we’ve saved the taxpayers enough to have an even BIGGER surplus.
Of course, as we all understand from listening to the Coalition over the past few days: A surplus is no big deal. Anyone could have done it. It’s like being a football coach…
You know, come Monday there are heaps of people who know exactly what the coach did wrong and if they were in the same position they’d have an undefeated record. Unfortunately, for Pete and Angus, they were in the same position and they didn’t produce the winning formula, so maybe Bazza telling you what Michael Voss did wrong has more credibility.
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