On Dec 24, 3:00*pm, "oonbz" wrote:
Piers Akerman

December 20 2008

This year will go down in history as the one in which the Australian
Government decided to pay people for producing hot air.



Well, if this turned out to be the first time Piers Akerman had been
right about something, since he worked out at ten that buckles and
velcro tabs were a lot easier to work with than shoe laces, he'd be in
for a pretty good year in 2009.

Scientific studies have shown that Piers Akerman is personally
responsible for 1% of Australia's greenhouse gas emissions associated
with "stationery" energy and 10% of pungent heavy breathing.

That's the gist of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's long-awaited program to
combat the as-yet-unproven theory of human-induced global warming.


Akerman of course doesn't read things that hurt his brain, which is
why he says's it's unproved.

Not only are Australians to be paid, but also the Rudd government's
wealth-redistribution package will ensure that some get paid more for doing
less to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.


An assertion he doesn't actually develop in the space below.

The stench surrounding the plan - like the stink of rotting fish - is only
getting worse.


Akerman smells rotting fish, because as the saying goes, the fish
stinks from the head". It started when Akerman chowed down on some
story out of the Heartland Institute and it simply died in his
mouth.

Not only are single people going to pay more than their share, but also the
ranks of the Rudd government's beloved "working families" have been
significantly thinned by Treasurer Wayne Swan to ensure that greater numbers
of middle- and low-income earners will be caught in Labor's climate-change
trap.

So much for the cliched "ladder of opportunity" Saint Kevin offered during
his mendacious election campaign last year.


He can't even get his slogan attributions right. The "ladder of
opportunity" was Latham's slogan, not Rudd's. His mind is still stuck
in 2004. I wonder if he still thinks the coalition will "keep interest
rates at record lows"?

snip ramble

Small businesses, which employ more than 3.8 million people, have all but
been ignored, yet they will be paying hugely escalating electricity prices
even with the 5 per cent cut.


Actually, the end users of the services will be paying any of this
impact, and then only if the business doesn't find ways to use energy
more efficiently or with fewer emissions.

According to Treasury's modelling, they will pay around 111 per cent more in
2020 relative to business as usual; that is, wholesale electricity prices
will double.



Of course, not all of the expenses in operating a business are energy-
related and those that reduce the energy intensity of their businesses
will get a competitive advantage.

The Rudd government is setting Australia up for increased unemployment and
is also plunging the nation into levels of debt not seen since Labor was
last in office 12 years ago.


So tired and so specious. As every government in the OECD now
acknowledges, debt is one of the tools that states can use to ensure
to mitigate financial downturns which would, in the end, cost more to
deal with than the secondary attempts to mainatin balanced budgets.
The analogy between personal debt and the debt of states is a very
poor one, and the Australian experience post-1996 bears this out.

The world had suffered an economic downturn in 1992, and government
revenues fell in Australia and costs rose as more were unemployed or
underemployed but when conditions in the world began to rebound in the
period post-1996 Australia began recovering too. The Howard government
continued to run deficits as late as 2001 but as world resource prices
surged, the budget went into surplus. Ironically, if the government
had spent more on port and rail infrastructure and spent up on
training in the future growth areas -- education, resources,
hospiatility and tourism --then Australia would have ridden the surge
in world economic activity better and produced even higher surpluses,
albeit they'd have had less impressive budgets in the period up to
2001. Had they, instead of flogging off Telstra for quick cash,
reconfigured the business so as to lay the foundations for the roll
out of high speed data services, they'd have had a weaker bottom line
in the short term but the benefits long term would have been
significant.

This is the main problem with the analogy between the budgets of
persons and states. A person has a limited working life a fairly
limited scope to raise income, and of course, there is only one
beneficiary. States on the other hand, are of long duration, and can
spread benefits and costs across generations.

Akerman, like so many of the simplistic deadheads of the right doesn't
understand this point and prattles on like some fire and brimstone
preacher about how somehow debt is an inherent evil. He utterly
ignores the one part of the analogy that is sound -- that debt is OK
if the total costs of ownership including debt are less than the toal
advantages of ownership to the holder of the asset and one can service
the debt without cost to other vital obligations.

The budget surplus left by the Howard-Costello government is gone


This was a *projected* surplus rather than an actual one. The
coalition has not specified a single spending program in FY2008-9 that
they'd abandon or cut back and indeed, earlier this year they were
calling for a 5 cents per litre cut in fuel excise and demanded
massive rises in pensions, and criticised Rudd for being stingy. They
opposed means testing solar panel rebates and the baby bonus.

So one may pardon those who snicker as they wring their hands over the
state of the projected surplus.

and
financial analysts now estimate that the level of Australian government debt
will reach nearly $100 billion by 2010.


What would it be if Australian unemployment reached 10%? If the as
yet unspecified coalition program were implemented?

Seven months ago, Rudd was pledging to keep Australia in modest surplus,

"over the economic cycle"

saying "the challenge we've got is responsible economic management".

That challenge has obviously defeated him.

Not yet because the economic cycle is as yet, incomplete.

Even Rudd's appeal for
Australians to go out and "spend, spend, spend" this Christmas has more than
a whiff of desperation about it, let alone a total lack of fiscal prudence.


Yet neither Akerman nor the coalition specifies what would amount to
fiscal prudence. And haven't we wandered a long way from the
ostensible point -- emissions trading?

As a wise fellow once advised, even a bargain is only ever a bargain if you're
buying something you actually need.


That's plainly absurd. People profit from trading in things they don't
need all the time. Indeed, if you "need" them then your ability to
extract a bargain from acquiring them is to that extent lower.

Not that Akerman could tell wisdom from witlessness.

Fran

http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegr...dex.php/dailyt...

Warmest Regards

Bonzo