Left would rather wreck than work

[nero_bolt]

 Way to many welfare leaners and takers  in this country now days

AFTER so irresponsibly dancing with his eight-year-old son in his office on budget night, and compounding the offence by ­allowing his wife to wear an elegant $750 Carla Zampatti dress, that cigar-chomping capitalist Joe Hockey made a speech. Towards the end, the Treasurer used the stirring phrase: “We are a nation of lifters, not leaners.” 

It was an echo of Robert Menzies’ brilliant Forgotten People oration of 22 May, 1942, a paean to the middle class, the “backbone of the nation”, those self-reliant Australians who provide “the intelligent ambition which is the motive power of human progress”.

But judging by the savage reaction to the government’s first, rather moderate budget, Hockey’s assessment of the national character was wishful thinking.

The truth is that we are at the tipping point at which we switch from a nation of lifters to a nation of leaners. Right now only about half the country pays more in tax than they receive in benefits. They are the lifters.

And between 40 and 50 per cent of voters receive their income directly from the government, either in the form of benefits or because they work for the public service, according to the Centre for Independent Studies.

After six years of Labor profligacy, winding back the entitlement mentality is a huge task. No one is grateful for handouts but they scream when they are taken away.

Of course, it wouldn’t have mattered what kind of budget Messrs Hockey and Abbott brought down. Most of the feral reaction, like the weekend’s protest marches, was pre-arranged by wreckers who can’t stand a conservative government in power.

There are no depths to which the wreckers won’t stoop, from attacking Joe Hockey’s family to manhandling conservative female politicians arriving to speak at universities, to calling for the assassination of the PM.

This week, union leader Tony Sheldon, Labor’s national vice-president, even called his troops to war, advocating intimidation, blockades and civil disobedience.

“We must stand up to corporate money influencing politics,” he told a Transport Workers Union conference. “Using vehicles to block roads, sit-ins, go-slows, hundreds of trucks descending on Canberra — we’ll do it if we have to.”

Totalitarian violence is all the new Australian left has, which shows the bankruptcy of their arguments.

• Miranda Devine
• From: The Daily Telegraph
• May 21, 2014 12:00AM

[cherry*135]

'fat cat' being a wealthy and powerful person, especially a businessman or politician.

[fourandsixpants]

love the Wrecking Ball vid freaky

just got this 'torrent' in my email:

Dear xxxxxx, Rather than inflict yet another torrent of numbers on you about the Budget last week, I thought I would let the dust settle a little and write to you in what I hope is a more reflective voice. The 2014-15 Budget is a tough one (although not the toughest we have seen), but with a combination of spending cuts and tax increases it does improve the Budget outcomes by $43.8 billion through to 2017-18. Looking further ahead it will reduce gross government debt in 2023-24 from the $667 billion it would have been had Labor's strategy continued to a still formidable $389 billion. While some economists have argued that the budget is not tough enough and that it should cut spending by more, they have been more than drowned out by people unhappy with the numerous cuts in spending programmes not to speak of the Medicare $7 copayment, the 2 per cent increase on the top tax bracket and the re-indexation of the fuel excise. But the starting point for this debate surely must be the budgetary situation which we inherited from Labor. Labor left our nation's finances in an unsustainable state in that too much spending was locked in without the revenues to cover it. It is commonplace to say that Australia's national debt to GDP is not as high as many other countries, but that is only because when Labor took over in 2007 we had no net debt at all, in fact there was $45 billion of cash at the bank. The melancholy truth of the matter is that Labor ran up larger and larger deficits and thus higher and higher debt in the midst of the biggest mining boom in our nation's history. According to the IMF, the rate of increase of Australian Government spending between 2012 and 2018 was forecast to be the highest in the developed world and the rate of increase in net debt over that period was the third highest in the world. So while most countries were cutting debt and restraining spending once the worst of the GFC was over, if Labor's plans had been left in place we would have been charging ahead spending and borrowing more and more. So clearly something had to be done. And our Budget has proposed a set of measures to repair the budget and return, over time, to a surplus. Now I can well understand, and respect, different views about each of the measures we have proposed. It is reasonable to question whether this or that should be cut, or indeed whether less spending should be cut and instead more raised by increasing taxes. All of that is the legitimate grist of political debate. Or you could argue that we can take a more leisurely path to return to surplus and seek to justify imposing a heavier burden on our children and grandchildren to pay for our expenditures. But what we have seen from Labor does not engage on any of those points. Mr Shorten simply complains - he doesn't like any of the cuts in expenditure or any of the increases in tax or charges either. Is he in denial? Refusing to accept what is obvious to everyone else, namely that something has to be done. What sort of la-la land is he inhabiting? Are we just to keep on spending more than we receive, borrowing more and more billions, kicking the fiscal can further down the road in the expectation that somebody else will deal with it? A responsible Opposition Leader would set out an alternative plan, one which adds up, which includes different measures, perhaps cuts less or different expenditure and raises more or different additional revenues. In contrast,  I recall very well in 2009 I proposed unpopular measures (increase the tobacco excise in fact) as an alternative to Labor's proposal to cut back on the tax rebate for private health insurance. Treasury analysis after last year’s change of government (in the 2013-14 Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, or MYEFO) showed that Labor’s legacy was debt of more than $34,000 per household.

[cherry*135]

No cuts in funding in the Budget for PRIVATE schools.

[freakiness]

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@am*3 wrote:

No cuts in funding in the Budget for PRIVATE schools.

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Nope, the ballet company headed by Sarah Murdoch did OK out of it too.

[nero_bolt]

I am correct and its on show every day 

 The left would rather wreck than work