Written By: - Date published: 12:42 pm, February 2nd, 2012 - 100 comments
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.
Written By: - Date published: 9:02 am, December 6th, 2011 - 33 comments
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.
Written By: - Date published: 7:07 am, November 23rd, 2011 - 53 comments
Last night TV1 revealed National’s lies on the explosive topic of asset sales. The Nats have no official advice to back up their asset sales claims, and information is being withheld from the public. Not good enough – vote them out.
Written By: - Date published: 9:16 am, November 11th, 2011 - 34 comments
Labour want to raise the minimum wage to $15. The Nats say that will cost jobs (they want to lower the minimum wage instead). Documents obtained by 3 News show that Treasury think the Nats are wrong. A vote for increasing the minimum wage will not cost jobs.
Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, December 2nd, 2010 - 11 comments
Remember how Peter Jackson and Warner Bros pulled the old Hollywood shakedown on us? By making a hollow threat to film elsewhere they got an extra $30 million and a law passed just for them. This was supposedly necessary to save a vital economy gain for the country but the Government knew that was bollocks all along.
Written By: - Date published: 5:16 pm, November 16th, 2010 - 14 comments
So people get sick and become less productive. I would have thought that that was pretty much stating the obvious.
Spending tax payers money trying to quantify how much imaginary wealth these sick people could have created for their employers if they had been perfectly well, seems to me to be bordering on lunacy.
Written By: - Date published: 12:09 am, November 2nd, 2010 - 54 comments
I saw Labour’s press release yesterday about the latest Treasury monthly statements. Basically, Treasury says ‘the economy’s a whole lot worse than we expected but we stand by our growth forecasts in the Budget’. Odd, because the Budget forecast 1.6% growth so far this year and it has actually been 0.7%. How good is Treasury at forecasting?
Written By: - Date published: 1:30 pm, October 13th, 2010 - 59 comments
Treasury have made their submission to the Welfare Working Group. Amongst the usual beneficiary-bashing and demands for privatisation, there are a couple of rare admissions that workers’ rights need strengthening. Which do we think will make it through…
Written By: - Date published: 7:15 am, October 6th, 2010 - 75 comments
The NZIER survey of business opinion shows that the economy shrank in the September Quarter. The December Quarter was already forecast to be negative and the Christchurch quake will make it worse. So, we’re almost certainly back into recession. That’s going to blow out the government’s debt. The underlying cause is peak oil.
Written By: - Date published: 10:45 am, May 21st, 2010 - 11 comments
What does Treasury make of National’s economic plan according to the Budget papers? Here’s the outlook for when National is kicked out of office at the end of 2011: Workers’ share of the economy will have fallen from an already miserable 43.6% to 41.5%. GDP per capita will be lower when National leaves office than when they entered it. Real wages will drop 2%.
Written By: - Date published: 11:06 pm, March 28th, 2010 - 71 comments
What a complete failure Paula Bennett is. If you could bear to sit through her interview on Q+A yesterday, you would have heard nothing but vacuous crap completely divorced from reality and her actual policies, which are opposed by Treasury, Health, and the Attorney-General. There are 67,000 more working age people on benefits than when Bennett became minister and she has no plan to reverse that.
Written By: - Date published: 3:23 pm, November 4th, 2009 - 40 comments
Back in February, former currency speculator John Key and former Treasury adviser Bill English started talking about suspending contributions to the Cullen Fund, which was set up to help fund superannuation. ‘It’s losing so much money’, they wailed. Some people pointed out that the markets were already recovering, that investments could now be bought at …
Written By: - Date published: 9:07 am, October 30th, 2009 - 19 comments
National’s favourite public servant (who got himself a nice pay rise), John Whitehead, has been offering dire warnings of the future. $2 trillion in debt by 2050! Something must be done! Naturally, the Treasury has an extreme right-wing solution – cut everything: cut health – yeah, a less healthy workforce that’ll be great for the …
Written By: - Date published: 1:33 pm, October 13th, 2009 - 32 comments
Predictably, the ideological vanguardists at Treasury are rolling out the flat tax argument again. For some unknown reason Radio NZ hasn’t published the Treasury papers they obtained under the OIA but the idea this time seems to be to use the money raised from higher GST, capital gains tax, land tax, changes to tax treatment …
Written By: - Date published: 5:06 am, September 30th, 2009 - 12 comments
This increasingly ramshackle government continues to astound. They’ve basically done nothing in a year when the country has been dealing with the worst economic crisis in decades. When they have tried to tackle big issues, the result has been incompetent policy produced entirely for political reasons - framed as moderate while paying off big business. Take Treasury’s view of …
Written By: - Date published: 1:33 pm, July 22nd, 2009 - 12 comments
Gordon Campbell has a great piece over at Scoop about Treasury’s latest ideological outburst and the resurrection of Don Brash. He points out the futility of choosing a man who played a large role in creating our wage gap with Australia in the first place to head a commission designed to close it: Brash wants …
Written By: - Date published: 12:02 pm, July 6th, 2009 - 71 comments
Well, we told you so. The Nats lied for weeks that a credit rating downgrade would be imposed on us if we didn’t cut contributions to the SuperFund. We didn’t fall for that for a minute. Even before the Budget, we pointed out that, except for the extraordinary conditions of the last two years, managed …
Written By: - Date published: 2:28 pm, December 5th, 2008 - 38 comments
It’s good to see Treasury’s extreme right-wing prescription for New Zealand has not been wholly embraced by the National Party – and it’s easy to see why. While Bill English (a former Treasury wonk himself) no doubt agrees with the policy ideas and direction outlined by Treasury, he has the disadvantage of being accountable to …
Written By: - Date published: 12:23 pm, December 5th, 2008 - 17 comments
Treasury’s briefing to Bill English as the new Minister of Finance must’ve pissed him off big time. Aside from the expected ideological burp (already covered in depth by No Right Turn) it reads like a long list of Labour achievements and calls on National is reign in its irresponsible promises. Here’s a taste of some …
Written By: - Date published: 2:59 pm, June 3rd, 2008 - 26 comments
This is the graph of the oil price forecasts Treasury used to underpin its fiscal model for the Budget. It assumes that oil would touch $115 a barrel US in about July this year before easing off to a long-run level of $100 a barrel. That is already up on Treasury’s forecast from November, which …
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