So you're saying that rather than provide some targeted counter-cyclical spending to cushion the fall, the better course of action for the country to take would be to stand back, wait for it all to blow up, bail out the banks just before they start to fail and cheer on the rapid house price deflation and business failures? Well, it worked for America I guess. Oh, wait...
Of course you don't need to do it every year. You only need to do it when there is a once-in-a-generation global financial crash. We're better off than we would have been and we're better off than virtually everyone else. What more were you hoping for exactly? (Genuine question. And I won't be facetious and suggest ponies and cake ) They're not valuable things, they're just the only things left that you're able to scrape together out of the rubble. Depends if you just let a crash happen or (literally) buy yourself time to restructure. It's a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to restructure, but you don't have the luxury of knowing that for sure until you're in a depression and realise how easy it would have been to prevent it. Indeed it does. Like ours was. The GFC was an external negative force!
Hmmm, i think we're from different planets Big A.D. I'm from a place where malinvestment is thought of as a bad thing, and to build on it year after year and create fragile structures is disastrous. Bailouts just ensure that the structural fragility continues. To purge such malinvestment and learn the lessons of risk-accountable investing forms a solid foundation from which business can thrive again. Smart, value-adding, profitable business. I would definitely argue that in 2008 we had a huge amount of personal and company leverage, a high (and uncompetitive) AUD, and a 'build houses and supply services to property' and 'sell all the minerals we can find' structurally deficient economy. So sure, we were strong at generating mining revenue, and increasing GDP by trading houses amongst ourselves like musical chairs, but we made ourselves very unresilient and very unbalanced. Dutch disease much? Now, we still have all those problems, plus a retail sector that is not recovering at all, a huge decline in manufacturing jobs and ability (once it's gone it takes time to get back), heavily subsidised car industry, overleveraged and larger than ever banks (thanks to post GFC mergers and arrogance), and a housing bubble that has run out of steam since the first home slaves boost. And if stimulus is supposed to promote a 'recovery'... and this 'recovery' is to the status quo, and the status quo just happens to be a structurally unsustainable, unsound and overleveraged consumer debt-bingeing economy - then what is the point of succeeding? All this 'success' does is add another couple of blocks to the top of the jenga tower. If you believe kicking the can down the road is better off - then you'd certainly think we are. But economics is about more than surviving an election cycle or keeping the country running for just one more day. It is about enabling an environment of choice, minimal regulation and accountability that allows business and entrepreneurs to flourish. In this regard we've gone backwards. What I was hoping for - is for Australia to wake the turtle up. For our politicians to realise their stupid keynesian mistakes and arrogance, and to start enabling the environment i pictured above. That involves some hard choices, none of which are supported by either of our two political parties.
It isn't. Our pre-emptive stimulus was about not falling into a big hole in the first place. The Americans waited until they'd fallen into the hole and are now trying to stimulate their way back out. Obviously both countries engaged in "economic stimulus" but the timing and the method of providing it was completely different. Saying our stimulus was a bad idea because the American stimulus hasn't worked is redundant because they're not comparable on a like-for-like basis. Well, I'd like to see that too, but I'm not convinced everyone in both major political parties. Labor and the Greens pushed through the Carbon Tax which is ultimately going to to change the way we use energy (perhaps with the possibility of achieving energy independence in the future), Malcolm Turnbull is a prominent supporter of a sovereign wealth fund to save and invest some of the proceeds from the mining boom, the NBN is going to fundamentally change how we communicate at work and at home. None of those are easy choices to make (Gillard in particular has paid a huge price for the Carbon Tax) and there are plenty of other options that are going to hurt if we decide to go in those directions but collectively we need to, as you so eloquently put it, wake the f*** up and stop parroting nonsense like "Keynesian failure" and "kicking the can down the road" and "our economy is in a terrible state" and "let the market decide who goes under". Going alllll the way back to the beginning of the thread, this is the sort of stupidity that the Tea Party is wallowing in. They were staring a big, fat sovereign default right in the face and saying "Bring it on, it'll ruin Obama". This is the restructuring period we bought ourselves. It's painful. It was always going to be painful. It's nowhere near as painful as what the Americans are going through after fumbling through the crisis and the crash that resulted from mucking around.
Well Swan and the rest of our gubbermint do look more like a socialist regime from South America than they do a "free world" government... dumb barstads :lol:
Australia needs a Bill of Rights and the first paragraph should ban the ALP and Greens from ever holding policitcal office ever again :lol:
that was simply a publicity stunt to make people think there is actually a difference between the two parties...
Well based on Hockey's values wrt "smaller government" and less government interference and the protection of personal liberties i'd have to say he's be many orders of magnitude better than the insane socialist poopall we have in Swan! If you cannt see this then you must be either 1. seriously disturbed 2. a poopall 3. both 1 and 2 :lol:
For that to occur we would require a new Constitution and a Bill of Rights - both designed to keep gubbermint the f.. out of our lives - or at least out of most areas of our lives they have wormed their way into.
I've listened to Joe Hockey. Has all the brains of a dead gnat. Another pearler from Hockey the other day - http://www.abc.net.au/insiders/content/2012/s3596058.htm I dunno why I even started this - you seem to think some politicians are better than others whereas I know they are all in it for themselves and their mates. They may think they aren't but they always are.
I hear you, but not all politicians are created equally corrupt/brainless. To put things into perspective: Ron Paul is the perfect politician (or near to as possible) in my mind. So on a linear scale where 0 = worst possible and 10 = best possible ... 0 = Joseph Stalin 1= Wayne Swan . . . 4 = Joe Hocky. . . . 10 = Ron Paul savvie???
I've listened to/read what Joe Hockey's stance is on a number of occasions, and while i'll admit he's no Ron Paul, he certainly does have some libertarian views. I just feel that if he were in charge then i'd probably have less money stolen from me by the government than i do under Swan. Certainly at an ideological level I believe that Joe believes that I have "more of a right" to the money earned by my own toil (as opposed to government) than does Swan (song) ...
How do you figure that? what would the use be - for example - if say the Libs won the next 3 or 4 elections in a row - got the budget under control - and started downsizing government to such an extent that we would be far happier than we are today and had travelled quite some distance towards the goal of "liberty and free markets. Freedom for all and an end to institutionalised coercion"? What would the use of all that be if at the next election the same bunch of asswipes from the ALP came into power again and basically undid all the good work of the previous years and simply legislated even bIGGER GOVERNMENT onto us? The point is - government should be PROHIBITED FROM HAVING THE POWER to legislate these kinds of changes - and this can only be done by a constitution and bill of rights that IS ACTUALLY UPHELD BY THE JUDICIARY!! savvie???
Wow this thread has grown a bit today. Anyway, here's Gary North's assessment - the US will begin with means testing social security. Here are a couple of quotes (link to full article below) http://mises.org/daily/6192/Means-Testing-Your-Social-Security-Payments I LOVE the "lies" line. :lol:
lol, sorry I often find your posts quite entertaining. OK, seriously, I don't want to get too much into my theories, many find them either quite abstract(though they really aren't) or downright subversive (which they sort of are). And many are just fed up with them. Do govts follow constitutions? My impression was that if they are inconvenient to what they want to do, they disregard them. You know the whole appeal to safety thing? Let us do what we want because we need to so we can protect you.... Maybe Liberal will make a difference, I don't know. I don't have the same faith as you do. To use an analogy here, I don't want to get better conditions for the slaves, I want to free the slaves. That's where my effort goes and it's much more long term than either the next election or the next decade or possibly (probably) more. If you guys succeed in getting a new constitution and bill of rights, and make sure the govt follow them, I will sing your praises (seriously), but it's not a project I'm interested in.
