John Key is nothing but an optimist. After delivering five successive deficit budgets and having driven core crown gross debt from $31 billion to a forecast $82 billion and despite in all likelihood delivering a wafer thin surplus that will rely on the stretching to breaking point of all sorts of accountancy rules he is talking publicly about a tax cut.
Prime Minister John Key is floating the possibility of future tax cuts as National goes into the election campaign.
Mr Key said Thursday’s Budget would show increasing surpluses during the next few years.
The Government should still be able to achieve its aim of getting debt below 20 percent of Gross Domestic Product by 2020, and have some money left over.
“So there are options for that additional expenditure, and they would obviously be spending by the Government or, alternatively, returning that through some sort of tax programme,” he said.
Asked where potential tax cuts might be directed, Mr Key said middle-New Zealand was an obvious group which paid a fair bit of tax and did not get a lot in return.
Mr Key said any tax cuts would not be announced in Thursday’s Budget, and National would have to decide before the 20 September election if it wanted to include them as part of its campaign promises.
Obviously on Planet Key the population is not ageing. We are not all getting older, there are not more and more people receiving superannuation and needing more and more health assistance. And climate change is not occurring and will not require greater and greater resources to adapt to given that we are not going to actually do anything about it. There is no child poverty and third world diseases never happen here. And there is no need to pay off all this debt that National has accumulated.
You have to admire Key’s chutzpah. But would you want to trust him with the Country’s credit card?
Powered by WPtouch Mobile Suite for WordPress
