Didn’t take much clairvoyance to see that National would fail to meet its promise of a Budget surplus by 2014/15. Once again, the forecasts have been downgraded. Once again, English could barely contain his grin as he said ‘welp, we’ll just have to cut some more’.
You’ve never seen a Finance Minister have his forecasts cut so often and look so happy about it. His failure against his own artificial target gives him an excuse to cut.
His party’s ineptness to blame but we pay.
The UK’s just entered a double-dip recession thanks to its austerity measures. English and Key seem hell-bent on following the same course.
Students look to be the target this round. Eligibility cuts, it seems. They say they won’t put interest on and they won’t move the repayment threshold until 2015 (that saved $70m – one off). The eligibility cuts will have to be pretty severe to save any real cash. Student loans only cost $800m a year – 1.1% of govt spending – so you would need to take a lot of it to make a difference.
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