Budget 2012

I haven't got much to say about the budget, not when I'm busy weeping into my lace handkerchief while looking at monochrome pictures of Old Zealand, singing along to Streisand's Memories as the neighbours pound on the wall threatening the police on me.

If newspapers have taught me anything is that a) NZ has a relatively low level of public debt while having high private debt, mostly because of lower than average OECD wages paired with incredibly costly homes and the costly mortgages that go with them, and b) don't hold them in the crook of your arm or you'll get ink all over yourself and an octopus will want to mate with you.

The Government's response to the private/public debt scenario is to squeeze incomes of the working and middle classes limiting their abilities to pay back debt on top of reducing spending power within the economy. On top of this public spending has been radically paired back. The Government has instead said that this will be an investment lead recovery and they have facilitated this by reducing the amount of taxes paid by the top earners who will go on to invest this money into...shoes, shares in overseas companies, shares in flogged off state assets so it's now in the hands of a private minority instead of the public...? They will invest their money in the laughter of small children.

This is supply side economics. This is what Bush/Cheney implemented and what played a large part in turning a healthy economy into one which was on the verge of collapse. I have seen American journalists question Key over this, I have yet to see local media do so. Instead they've let Key get away with comparing himself to Obama. This notion may have caused your head to explode. I apologise.

The budget lets us feel better because it cuts funding from areas that we have no real understanding of (research institutes?? who cares, amirite?), stinky smokers, and they get to have the media say that they're Getting Tough on the Rich because of some token loophole tightening for people hiring out their private planes so that they'll only get half a rebate back now. They also punched a couple of kids in the gut and ran away with their newspaper money, but hey, all this is distraction from the Big Picture which nobody seems to be willing to tackle.

Key might not be Bush as far as religious dogma is concerned, but he certainly is as far as economic dogma. I'm not wishing to be a fear monger, or an alarmist, but I have just eaten my cats and am typing this from a bomb shelter. Lets not panic, but we're all doomed. On the bright side Key was interviewed from his home in Hawaii and is said to be 'quite relaxed, actually'.