...Is that they are seldom 'libertarian' enough. We read once screed after another from angry Hayekians contending that taxation is theft. The welfare state, the public broadcaster, virtually all publically owned and funded assets are an affront to 'liberty', evidence of a society heading down the road to surfdom. Read more »
There is heaps of commentary on the Budget on a myriad of different websites - a couple I found of interest are here, here and here. Read more »
Pre-Budget speculation gets fairly tiresome after a while – mostly just scene setting leaks and people writing and saying things to fill the space before they have something substantial to write and talk about. Budget night provides the relief of actually getting into the real thing after a lot of mostly empty shadow-boxing. Read more »
Michael Egan has a cogent argument in The Australian regarding the need for the Labor Party to stand up to the unions. My arguments have centred on macroeconomic policy concerns and the need to avoid a wages explosion that will damage the economy and force a recession. Read more »
Sitting on the other side of the world, I’ve felt rather removed from budget commentary, though I’ve found much to agree with in Nicholas Gruen’s called for harsher cuts in middle-class welfare (can we means-test the first homeowners’ grant too?), Andrew Norton’s call for fewer cuts in basic statistical provision (would Lindsay Tanner mind if we took some of the higher education fund and used it to patch up his cuts t Read more »
I have to admit I am ignorant about attitudes. I have never really got down to a bedrock understanding of how they develop and what they signify, except that I consider they are important in relations to other people. It is, I think, a common skill that people are able to pick up attitudes stated and implied, perhaps using different cues. My take, to misquote David Bohm is that attitudes are “frozen emotions”, as distinct from “frozen light”. Read more »
I got this insight into traditional Labor insensitivity to refugees from Tim Blair. Blair points out that Rudd is doing his best to keep the insensitivity tradition alive. A nice quote from sill living treasure ‘Then-there-was- Gough’ in 1977:"Any sovereign nation has the right to determine how it will exercise its compassion and how it will increase its population." Read more »
As we draw near to budget time, there has been plenty of talk about what “middle Australia” will get. But where exactly is the middle? To provide a more precise sense, I’ve tabulated the pre-tax annual income distributions for individuals and households, in the 2008-09 tax year. My raw data is the 2006 HILDA survey, which was roughly coincident with the 2006-07 tax year. Those numbers are then inflated by 8%, which is roughly what the budget papers suggest nominal wage growth has been over the past two years. Read more »
Since I last blogged about the podcasts I regularly listen to, several more have been added to the rotation, and one has returned to the fold . . .
Dogma Free America Read more »
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