Bernard Hickey: “It is extraordinary for the Prime Minister to call the Treasury’s short and long term forecasts a “load of nonsense” and yet rely on the medium term ones to promise all manner of riches to voters on the eve of an election.”
Brian Fallow in The Herald summarises the take-home messages from the latest Treasury report. National have us on track to disaster.
Extracts from Rod Oram’s piece in the SST as posted on Facebook. “What’s missing from [the budget], and the six before, is any glimpse of the world we live in, let alone the political leadership we need to survive and thrive in it.”
We the people only learned of Treasury projections on the costs of inaction on climate change (up to $52 billion) because someone screwed up a redacted document. We were never meant to know. And National’s Minister for Climate Change Issues statement on the matter is that Treasury should have done a better job of hiding this vital information from the public.
Rob Salmond at Polity has been having a look at Bill English’s “neutral” tax change in 2010…
Bill English recently heralded his tax switch as making net tax more progressive. He lied. It actually made net tax at least $500 million more regressive.
Treasury has blown the dust off its 1980s economics textbooks and offered the same old failed prescription. Their moronic suggestion to cut education spending to finance tax cuts can be dismissed out of hand. But their suggestion of core Crown spending cuts has some merit; I know where we can get $75m that’s being spent on useless advice and incompetent forecasting.
Cartoonist Guy Body in The Herald, with one of those pictures that is worth a thousand words…
John Key at a press conference yesterday made some claims about wages, inflation and Treasury predictions that really need looking at a bit more closely.
