kewpid.net

More evid­ence that the fed­eral government’s claim to be super­ior eco­nomic man­agers is highly dubi­ous with the announce­ment that the 06/07 budget sur­plus is $17.3 bil­lion — $3.7 bil­lion higher than the treasurer’s budget speech pre­dicted a mere 3 months ago

Sumuru

. This is not a once off thing. It hap­pens year after year, and calls into ques­tion the inde­pend­ence of the Treas­ury. It allows Peter Cos­tello to appear on tele­vi­sion, wave his hands, and announce money pour­ing from the skies into gov­ern­ment cof­fers. Your money. Bil­lions more than the gov­ern­ment needed to take.

Bey­ond the yearly bait-and-grab spec­tac­u­lar, we also saw the con­tinu­ation of a theme of this government’s approach to gov­ern­ment — the devol­u­tion of respons­ib­il­it­ies to the private sec­tor. It was far more egre­gious when it involved del­eg­at­ing decision-making powers, such as the privat­isa­tion of the national job place­ment net­work, because it dir­ectly involved people’s lives. Instead of cri­ti­cism, it was hailed as a great innov­a­tion des­pite the gap­ing grey areas it cre­ated in terms of account­ab­il­ity and admin­is­trat­ive review.

This theme has now exten­ded to del­eg­at­ing gov­ern­ment spend­ing Run for the Money full movie . The Future Fund. The Higher Edu­ca­tion Endow­ment Fund. The Med­ical Equip­ment Fund. The Infra­struc­ture Fund. What’s next?

The ori­ginal Future Fund was cre­ated as an account­ing façade to cre­ate the illu­sion of a smal­ler budget sur­plus, lim­it­ing Labor’s abil­ity to make spend­ing prom­ises. Now that the gov­ern­ment is debt-free and con­tin­ues to find itself drown­ing in rev­enue, it’s cre­at­ing cap­ital funds left, right and centre to con­tinue with the trick. It’s an intel­lec­tu­ally sat­is­fy­ing solu­tion if you’re old, rich and won’t last to see the con­sequences, but it has to be care­fully weighed against other options.

The mooted rate of return for these funds is roughly 5% p.a. above the rate of infla­tion. But the present value of money spent on infra­struc­ture and edu­ca­tion NOW is con­ceiv­ably a much bet­ter use of resources with a far higher rate of return. It’s false eco­nomy to make the present gen­er­a­tion save for the future’s spend­ing needs, when 1) the future would be in a much stronger eco­nomic and tech­no­lo­gical pos­i­tion and 2) when the future would bene­fit from cur­rent spend­ing anyway.

It’s crim­inal for the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to shirk its cur­rent respons­ib­il­it­ies just because it likes big num­bers.Ven­geance Val­ley full movie