25 November 2008

Deficit budget on the cards?

| johnboy
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The Canberra Times has a piece on our brave leader, Jon Stanhope, publicly mulling the possibility of the ACT budget going into deficit as the global economy implodes.

For mine there’s nothing wrong with a bit of deficit spending in the down times of an economic cycle.

But in the past budget deficit scares have been used by Mr. Stanhope to justify things like massive school closures.

Anyone care to speculate as to what might be on the hit list this year to be safely forgotten when the next election comes around in four years’ time?

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thanks Thumper for noticing .. Gun Al … you are not defending this crap are u?

Gunghalin pool … mmmmm … the kiddies can bleed in it after running through new the barbed spears artwork in Gunghalin park. Makes the GDE art actually look quite nice.

You will probably find the deficit will mostly relate to losses in investments from entities like the superannuation account from the crash in the stockmarkets add in less conveyancing from huge building projects that aren’t coming about because companies are delaying everything.

No doubt the government failed to insulate themselves from these things happening in the first place..

Clown Killer7:37 pm 25 Nov 08

JB I think over egging the argument with emotive phrases like “massive school closures” detracts from the post. The sad reality was that failing to reinvest sensibly in the ACT education system may have been politically expedient, but morally an economically inappropriate.

Budget cuts can be identified by homing in on Government largess that should otherwise be picked up by individuals, reducing the overall size of government and applying simple policy tests like asking the question – will this policy lead or contribute to bigger government or discourage people from addressing the issue on their own?

Government spending can then be directed at infrastructure projects that pumps money into the private sector thus helping to spread the fiscal love.

Canberra lost 10% of aps jobs in the last recession.

Window tax? What about a Poll Tax! Imagine the Working Families’ reactions to that one. I wonder who would perform the Lady Godiva protest ride at that one? Elkie whatshername perhaps.

They could start charging for bin collections, create pay parking for every street in Canberra, build a random toll road, pull out all those pesky playgrounds or introduce a good old fashioned window tax (then increase the maximum building heights). Huzzah.

VYBerlinaV8_the_one_they_all_copy2:46 pm 25 Nov 08

Who voted for these penile implants we call MLAs?

Gungahlin Al2:45 pm 25 Nov 08

The difference is that at the same time there is the clarion call for spending on infrastructure in order to stimulate the local and global economies.

The government would go into deficit to fund such infrastructure still going ahead, rather than into deficit and therefore not do stuff.

We’ve had a decade of fiscal short-sightedness at the federal level, and to embrace the ALP’s spin, squandered opportunities to get these sorts of things in place while everything was rosey. But the solution now is not to pull your heads inside your shells and hibernate it all away. It is to carry on with life.

I was amazed to hear that one friend working in IT sales in Canberra has just been retrenched. What an amazingly dumb thing for that business to do – in *this* town of all places. So with hardly any sales staff, in a couple of months they’ll look at the severe drop off in new sales, and nod sagely to themselves about how wise they were to put off staff when they did. Failing utterly to realise that they themselves created that situation…

Is work going to go away in this town during a recession? Not bloody likely.

JB is right. The last time they spoke budgetary gloom and doom (2005), they were actually softening us up to something (school closures). Of course, there was no budget deficit that time, and so why should we believe it now – same party, same department doing the forecasting.

What have they got in store this time, not more school closures, surely?

Watch the election promises, and more, fall one by one.

Thing is, people don’t forget so quickly.

Hargreaves was astonished that people are still upset about Griffith library and about their schools being gone.

like that waste of 20million on a pool that is not needed? (yet) probably right.

personally I reckon everything promised to gungahlin is going to go on hold, for re-announcement just before the next election.

Probably ‘fringe’ health programs that make sound long-term economic sense.

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