There is no “strong and stable” government to “lead” us. Maximum uncertainty! No end in sight! According to received wisdom (and all those people in a self-interested rush to ordain the born-to-rule-party) the market should be panicking! In fact…
Expect plenty of Nat boasting on “the economy” in the election campaign. They’ll be desperate to hide the inconvenient fact that ordinary workers are going backwards.
The Festival of Dangerous Ideas (FODI) brings leading thinkers and culture creators from around the world to the Sydney Opera House stages and online to discuss and debate the important ideas of our time.
It’s basically flat-lining – only partially animated by immigration and a housing bubble.
A great reception for Little’s speech, and a take-home message that resonates well.
Our “business leaders” are doing an objectively poor job. Perhaps instead of insulting Kiwi workers as “pretty damned hopeless”, Bill English should be taking aim at these captains of industry.
Excellent work by RNZ, following up on previously redacted documents to expose this sham.
The excellent Clarke and Dawe on the G20 and growth.
The economy is a mess, the Nats have no ideas, and their current policies (e.g. hypothetical tax cuts) are getting laughed out of town. National is useless on the economy, and the sooner we the people wake up to this fact, the better off we will be.
Labour looks at increasing jobs, wage growth, and having the government run surpluses. National looks at a 1% wage growth after inflation after years of falling real wages and no drop in real unemployment as being a sign of a healthy economy? Yeah right. Most of the growth in the economy is simply passing wage-earners by. It is going elsewhere. That is National’s legacy: strong growth for the fortunate few, lagging and insipid growth for everyone else
No Right Turn succinctly points out the impact of the International Monetary Fund changing its mind on the adverse effects of inequality in the economic sphere. A case of an accumulation of facts overriding dumb ideology.
My regular Sunday piece of interesting, longer, deeper stories I found during the week. It’s also a chance for you to share what you found this week too. This week: taxes and growth, foreign wars and the quality of MPs. And the Ig Nobels.
Five to fifteen years of economic turmoil. Peak oil. Climate change. For “Western” / OECD countries it’s time to start creating a world based on a different kind of growth.
The Government have been pushing a line that Christchurch is holding us back as an economy. The poor people of Christchurch are to blame for all our woes apparently, with their earthquake. We shouldn’t blame National, just Cantabrians.
But it’s not true.
National have become a very adept PR machine. While not adept at running the country, they’ve become great at running statistics. John Key […]
Ecological economist Brian Davey explains how while we need to fix the problems of peak oil and climate change, we’re not going to get anywhere until we deal with the psychopathic elite of bankers who have control of the world economy.
Tax take is down, deficit is up, growth forecasts for next year are down. Nice to be told all this one week after the election, eh? Still John and Bill are relaxed and optimistic that the future will still be bright.
National are seen by many as the party of business, and thus the party of the economy, who know what’s best for the country’s wallet. But the statistics don’t add up. Their reputation is undeserved.
Looks like the RWC isn’t going to be the economic stimulus that we hoped. We’re stuck in the doldrums, and (just like in England) the government’s austerity programme is exactly the wrong response.
So here we are then. “Roaring out of recession”. Or – not.
Farrar and others of the Right push for ever lower taxes, but their arguments are laughably flimsy. Tax cuts don’t raise revenue. Tax cuts don’t cause growth. In search of their “superior moral justification for selfishness” the Right are going to have to do a lot better than that…
Dr David Suzuki has given the keynote speech at the Green Party Conference on Sustainable Economics. Here is a fantastic presentation of his, about why our obsession with economic growth is suicidal. Watch it – it’s pretty powerful stuff.
Trying to get my head around the economic arguments going on. Hearing contradictory things. Who’s telling the truth? ls Labour’s new overseas investment policy Stalinism that will ruin the economy, as Key claimed on Monday and Tuesday? Or is the same as the existing law, as Key claimed on Monday and Tuesday?
Does anyone have a spare Earth? Or two — or three? If so, could you please speak up, because humanity is going two need two Earth’s worth of resources by 2030.
This government seems to have confused the means and the ends. Growth and money have become the ends, when they only ever should have been the means. Surely what should matter now is that we have a happy, fulfilled society, where people have the opportunity to do what they want.
For the last several decades the over-riding mantra across western governments has been that what is important above all else is economic growth. Now is the time to question whether it should still be our main aim and guiding light.
Tories claim that tax cuts “cause growth” in the economy – they “grow the pie”. But it’s rubbish. No honest review of the long term historical picture can sustain the claim. Tax cuts don’t cause growth.
