Diary of our stinking Govt.

As it's more than 100 days now, it has been suggested that a new thread was needed.  The current govt has been breaking promises and telling lies at a rate so fast it's hard to keep up.Woman Happy

 

This below is worrying, "independent" pffft, as if your own doctor is somehow what? biased, it's ridiculous. So far there is talk of only including people under a certain age 30-35, for now. Remember that if your injured in a car, injured at work or get ill, you too might need to go on the DSP. They have done a similar think in the UK with devastating consequences.

 

and this is the 2nd time recently where the Govt has referred to work as welfare???? So when you go to work tomorrow (or tuesday), just remember that's welfare.

 

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-20/disability-pensioners-may-be-reassessed-kevin-andrews/5400598

 

Independent doctors could be called in to reassess disability pensioners, Federal Government says

 

The Federal Government is considering using independent doctors to examine disability pensioners and assess whether they should continue to receive payments.

 

Currently family doctors provide reports supporting claims for the Disability Support Pension (DSP).

But Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews is considering a measure that would see independent doctors reassess eligibility.

 

"We are concerned that where people can work, the best form of welfare is work," Mr Andrews said at a press conference.

 

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Re: Diary of our stinking Govt.

A newspapers Economic Editor isn't a citizen journalist.

For example, Ross Gittins, Economic Editor of the SMH for 35+ years.

"He is a winner of the Citibank Pan Asia award for excellence in finance journalism, a Nuffield press fellow at Wolfson College, Cambridge and a journalist-in-residence at the Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne. He's also helped thousands of students through the HSC and undergraduate studies with his writings โ€“ particularly his Saturday educational column.

In 2003, Gittins was awarded a Centenary Medal for services to economic journalism and made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2008."
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I have been having trouble finding Gittins contributions as a citizen blogger/journalist in any of the couple of "popular" self styled "independent"  minor journals much quoted by pink myopics.

However,  Gittins is an economist that I do read , even though I prefer Alan Kohler.

 

Past Gittins:

Labor sells its soul to fight deficit levy

 

 

If you needed any convincing Labor is a party entirely adrift from its supposed values and purpose, given over now to politicking, expedience and opportunism, just wait for its reaction to Tuesday's budget.

It will vehemently oppose Joe Hockey's deficit levy - no matter how watered down it is by then - and his intention to resume indexing the petroleum excise on the basis of no stronger argument than that they're broken promises.

These are two measures Labor should strongly support if it's sticking to its principles - one that makes the tax system fairer and one that supplements the carbon tax in fighting climate change.

If Labor were truly the social democrat, progressive party it wants us to think it is, it would advocate and fight for bigger government. Bigger not for its own sake, but because there are still many much-needed services and assistance yet to be provided, with governments best placed to provide them.

As we know, Labor can always think of new ways to spend money - the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the Gonski education reforms, for instance - but when it comes to raising sufficient revenue to cover the cost of these genuinely worthy causes, Labor's courage deserts it.

 

"But no, Labor's commitment to principle is now so weak it can't resist the temptation to exploit the unpopularity of an opponent implementing good policy.

By now I can hear the Laborites' plaintive cry: We're only doing what Abbott did! My point, exactly. The party that always claims the high moral ground has descended to the point where its highest claim is: we're no worse than Abbott.

Labor's further descent into political game-playing since it returned to opposition is proof that Abbott is the outstanding politician of his era. The man could not only turn his own side into a party of climate change-denying punishers of boat people and even Australian poor, he can inveigle his opponents into becoming a party than stands for nothing. Getting your own back isn't a policy that much appeals to Australian voters. Nor is opposing everything.

 

"proof that Abbott is the outstanding politician of his era."

I bet that hurts!

 

nษฅยบษพ

 

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Re: Diary of our stinking Govt.

"I have been having trouble finding Gittins contributions as a citizen blogger/journalist in any of the couple of "popular" self styled "independent" minor journals much quoted by pink myopics."

No one clained they were in any independent journals.
There are however direct links to Gittins articles from his own site or SMH or The Age posted throughout thus thread. Ones which do criticize the Budget and one that specfically states Hockey's Budget is a FAIL and why that is so. Plenty of them post Hockey's Budget release.

That Gittins article you quoted is BEFORE Hockeys Budget was released. Read the ones after.

Posters are free to post links to any articles they want to, in any thread. No one has to justify why they do so.

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How about today's one (Ross Gittins)

Why Hockey's budget is unsustainable

Coalition governments have been banging on about the need for "smaller government" since Malcolm Fraser started echoing Maggie Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. They've talked without doing anything. Until now.

Few have noticed, but the goal of this budget is to reduce government spending by 1.1 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), from 25.3 per cent this financial year to 24.2 per cent in 2024-25.

If that doesn't impress you, this may: Joe Hockey's plan is to cut government spending to 0.7 percentage points below its 30-year average of 24.9 per cent.

That makes this the most ideologically driven budget we've seen - not that Hockey or Tony Abbott will admit it. They claim the budget's harsh measures are needed simply to get the budget back to surplus and start paying down the public debt.

They don't admit it was their choice to do this in a way that achieved savings more by cutting spending than by cutting tax expenditures. They cut the real growth in pensions, but left high-income-earners' absurdly generous superannuation tax concessions untouched.

They tightened up the family allowance and cut young people's access to the dole, but didn't tackle the concessional taxation of capital gains, negative gearing or company cars, while ignoring the miners' diesel fuel rebate and other business welfare. They imposed a co-payment on GP visits, but didn't abolish the private health insurance rebate.

The intended effect of this bias against spending and in favour of tax breaks is to make the budget significantly less redistributive. That's because, particularly with our tightly means-tested welfare system, government spending tends to benefit the less well-off, whereas tax expenditures go disproportionately to people at the top.

So it's the "end of entitlement" for people in the bottom half, but no change to the entitlements of the well-off, save for a small three-year tax levy.

It's true the government's 10-year "medium-term budget projection" sees tax collections rising as a proportion of GDP from 21.6 per cent this year to 23.9 per cent in 2019-20, at which point it would be prevented from rising further. (This cap is based on the average tax ratio to GDP between 2000-01 and 2007-08.)

This seems to indicate Hockey is relying more on higher taxes than lower government spending to get the budget back to a surplus of 1.5 per cent of GDP. But this impression is misleading.

At 25.3 per cent of GDP, government spending at present is only a little above its long-term average of 24.9 per cent, whereas at their present 21.6 per cent, tax collections are well below Hockey's benchmark of 23.9 per cent.

It's no secret why tax collections are unusually weak at present: because the fall in mineral export prices is causing real national income to grow more slowly than real GDP and because of the continuing revenue loss from the eight income-tax cuts in a row we enjoyed when the Howard government assumed the resources boom (and its inflated company-tax collections) would run forever.

To get tax collections back to a more normal proportion of GDP, the government is relying mainly on allowing another six years of bracket creep. The 23.9 per cent cap after 2019-20 is supposed to allow the resumption of regular tax cuts (though who will benefit most from those cuts is another matter).

What we do know is that, whereas the eight successive tax cuts weren't particularly "progressive" in their effect on the income-tax scale, its particular shape at present means the following eight years of bracket creep will be highly "regressive", causing average tax rates towards the bottom to rise a lot further than those at the top.

So even the recovery in tax collections will come mainly at the expense of the less well-off.

It's clear the government will have much trouble getting many of its more controversial measures through the Senate. What the 10-year projection will end up looking like is anyone's guess.

But even if the budget passes intact, it contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Pensions heading inexorably below the poverty line? Pressure throughout the public sector for wages - including for nurses, teachers, childcare and age-care workers - to rise no faster than inflation, while private sector wages continue rising in real terms with productivity growth?

The vice-chancellor herd given total control over how high uni fees (and graduate debts) rise, including whether they make training for jobs as nurses, teachers and even government lawyers financially untenable?

This budget is unsustainable because the wider implications of its measures haven't been thought through. By knocking back its worst features, the Senate will be doing the Coalition (and the nation) a favour.

http://www.rossgittins.com/2014/06/why-hockeys-budget-is-unsustainable.html
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Re: Diary of our stinking Govt.

Monman - did you claim that photo of Abbott and Prince Charles was 'photoshopped'. I haven't seen you acknowledge you were incorrect about that.
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This budget is unsustainable because the wider implications of its measures haven't been thought through. By knocking back its worst features, the Senate will be doing the Coalition (and the nation) a favour.

 

 

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More Ross Gittin Articles

 

Why exactly are we punishing young jobseekers?

 

Hockey's Budget applies a chopper, not a brain

 

Hockey's  Budget game plan favours the well-off

 

Less to the Budget than meets the eye - the more of the Budget's fine print I get through the less impressed I am....

 

 

 rossgittins.com

 

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The budget was a giant attempt to get back to surplus solely by cutting spending and not increasing taxes. It failed.

 

 

http://www.rossgittins.com/2014/05/less-to-budget-than-meets-eye.html

 

 

 

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Re: Diary of our stinking Govt.

Gittins May 2014

 

Yes, the budget will hit demand, but not too badly Gittins May 2014

"The consumerist question about this week's budget is: how did it affect my pocket? The egalitarian question is: was its treatment of people at the bottom, middle and top reasonably fair? But the macro-economic question is: how will the budget affect the economy?
 

We know the economy has been, and is expected to continue, growing at below its medium-term trend rate of about 3 per cent a year, the rate that keeps unemployment steady. So will the budget help to speed things up or slow them down? In the economists' jargon, will its effect be ''expansionary'' or ''contractionary''?

It may seem a simple question, but economists have various ways of attempting to answer it. One outfit asking itself this question is the Reserve Bank. The Reserve will take account of the budget's effect - along with various other factors' effects - on the strength of demand in the economy in making its monthly decisions about whether to raise, lower or leave unchanged the instrument it uses to affect the strength of demand, the official interest rate.

In making that assessment the Reserve takes a very simple approach: in what direction is the budget balance expected to change between the present financial year and the coming financial year that starts in July? And having determined the direction of the change, how big is it? Obviously, the bigger it is, the more notice we should take of it.

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Taken at face value, the answers to those questions aren't ones most people would be pleased to hear. Joe Hockey is expecting a budget deficit of $49.9 billion in the financial year just ending and a deficit of $29.8 billion in the coming year..............................

 

..............................The OECD's various multipliers for Australia range from 0.3 to 1.3. If we use a narrower range closer to the middle of that range - 0.6 to 0.9 - and apply these multipliers to the 0.7 per cent of GDP we calculated earlier, we get an estimated negative impact on GDP of between 0.4 and 0.6.

This suggests the budget's negative effect on demand won't be too terrible.

And note this: most of the expected improvement in the deficit in 2014-15 comes from an expected improvement in the economy (more people paying more tax; fewer people needing assistance) rather than from all the tough changes Hockey announced on Tuesday night.

The lion's share of the budget savings don't come until 2017-18. Why? Partly for political reasons but also because, as he's long been saying, Hockey didn't want to hit the economy while it was down."

 

I understand why some  C&P because little thought is needed, and in some cases it would appear,  no proof reading. What  joy/intellect  is there in just sticking others articles (or just a link) up on the Board sans comment of any sort,  just because it supports a particular political bias at the moment. However,  Gittins writes about economics from a standpoint  that requires clear  bifocal  lenses,  unlike the citizen journalists "beloved" here  from the self styled "independent" rags!

 

The first paragraph, above, succinctly puts in order how a generally selfish electorate react:

First:         "how did it affect my pocket?, "

Second:  " was it fair ?,"  

Third:        "how will the budget affect the economy?"

 

"Ross Gittins lectures year 11 and 12 high school students around Australia to in order to share his knowledge and understanding of the Australian economy."

It would appear that his lectures are falling on deaf ears

nษฅยบษพ

 

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