One of the attacks that the Coalition have levelled at Labor in the past few years is the hip pocket one of “When Labor run out of money, they come after yours.”

Before I examine the economics of that, I’d just like to consider the absolute hide of the political machinery responsible for Robodebt talking about going after someone else’s money. Let me just remind you that the grab that people call Robodebt wasn’t just immoral, unethical and callous, it was also illegal. And, not only that people knew it was illegal. Read “Mean Streak” by Rick Morton for a blow by blow examination of the sins of the politicians and public servants involved…

Anyway, it’s quite a feat that the Coalition ignore the fact that they tripled government debt while in office… Yeah, yeah, Covid and all that, there was a good reason… eventually. Even before that they’d made no inroads and they hadn’t produced a surplus. But, hey, they did produce a “Back in Black” mug which could be sold as promotion for an AC-DC album once it became obvious that the only surplus that the Liberals had was a surplus of politicians who were prepared to pay $30million for a bit of land valued at $3million or billions to companies which didn’t even have an office…

Ok, let’s look at the economics of everything in a few hundred words or less…

1. Governments who print money never run out of money with the following qualifications,
2. Governments who print too much money may run out of ink to print the money.
3. Most money isn’t cash which is something that most people have trouble grasping.

So why don’t governments just print more money and solve all the problems?

Well, if we take the current housing/rental crisis it becomes very obvious.

If we elect say, Ralph Babble to be our absolute ruler and he announces that he’s giving a million dollars to each first home buyer to buy a house, then I’m sure that you can see what’s going to happen…

All right, I’m going to make it very simple for those of you who are saying it’s a supply problem and that he should only give it to first home buyers who are going to BUILD a house…

The simple fact is that, while option two is better than option one, both will push prices up and cause the sort of inflation that enable the RBA to say, “See, see, we were right… Hallelujah one of our predictions proved right at last, praise the lord and pass the invisible hand of the market onto our fevered brows and caste out the demons that try to tell us that we don’t know what we’re talking about just because we’ve got it wrong more times than a man betting on tails when it’s a two-headed coin…”

By the way, has anyone else noticed that the $2 coin has the head of the sovereign one side and the head of some Indigenous fellow on the other? Seems rather elitist, not to mention racist, to call one side tails and the other heads…

It doesn’t matter how much money you throw at the housing problem. Unless you have enough tradies and building supplies and all the resources necessary to build the houses, you’re never going to build enough to fix the problem.

The simple truth is that money is a bit like fertiliser. The government can use it to help things grow but unless you actually have something there to grow, all you end up with is a steaming pile of shit.

Speaking of which, did you like Dutton’s release of his costings. I could go into a lot of detail about how things like the assumption that we can presume that we won’t need as much electricity in the future owing to the fact that to presume otherwise stuffs up their modelling, but I think I’ll leave that to people with more expertise than me. Suffice to say, the whole exercise is a bit like dealing with a five year old who won’t take off his Spiderman suit to go Aunt Agatha’s funeral: You can point out that it’s inappropriate for such an occasion. You can point out that he’s been wearing it for a week and it’s starting to smell funny.You can argue that there will be no bad guys at the funeral, so Spiderman does not need to be there to save everyone. However, in the end, it might be simpler just to say: “You’re not bloody Spiderman, so stop living in your fantasy world and grow up!” which seems a little harsh but when sometimes people need to be told the truth, even if they are the leader of the opposition.

“Look, Peter, your party stuffed up the rollout of the NBN, failed to build the promised carparks and you can’t really blame Labor for the fact that Snowy 2.0 got well behind schedule before they took power, so take off the bloody Spiderman suit and start a sensible conversation about energy!” 

Still, it’s been a bad week for Labor on the economic front. Unemployment fell to 3.9%, which has everyone saying that the RBA can’t possibly reduce interest rates while you’ve got people in work… Mm, remember when interest rates were all about actual inflation? And remember when low unemployment figures were a good thing? Just like when a Budget surplus was a sign of good economic management.

But not apparently when Labor is in power.

Yes, Labor really need to get their act together and start doing better for those struggling with the cost of living. However, if they do anything for those struggling with the cost of living, it may push up inflation, so they better not do anything…