OnPoint: There is no depression in New Zealand. Apparently.
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Keith's back! I'm making my happy face.
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Keith! Keith! KEITH!!!
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I'm so happy I'm not even going to read the post.
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I'm afraid that I won't be writing about my time inside.
Aha! So you have some goods on them.
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The reason was simple: I wanted to peek behind the curtain, and see what goes on in the heart of the machine.
So it wasn't the money?
Also - I need you over here. Bar chart, damnit!
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Welcome back Keith!
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I don't whether to be uplifted or downturned...
Keith's back! I'm making my happy face.
Yeah, me too!
Bar chart, damnit!
I made you a bar chart
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I made you a bar chart
I think he wanted you to admit that you were wrong. And buy everyone beer.
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Beer damnit!
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Welcome back Keith.
Looking forward to more in the future...
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So apparently there is a silver lining to the blue cloud.
wb Keith! -
How can you have a blue cloud James? Apart from anything else, it would very difficult to see against the background.
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The most depressing thing to me about this depression for NZ is that right now is exactly when the entire nation needs to be getting real about what the hell are we going to do. But unfortunately the way our elections work, the exact opposite has happened, the nation goes into 'defend the tribe' mode and everything has focused on looking at how to blame everything on the other tribes. I see it as a major failing of our adversarial focused system.
There are 2 main question divisions: External and internal. How we manage our internal economy is going to be very important to the comfort of NZers over the next few years. And what is going to happen to the external economy, and what can NZ do about it?
Ordinarily, when times are good, I can't give a crap about economics. I tend to vote on social issues. I figure that the economic differences between the big parties are minor, that we can flip between slightly different styles of economic management and not notice the difference. That's 'people like me' of course, who are not reliant on benefits and don't have the opportunity to avoid much tax, and who do use services that could be provided publicly or privately. 'People unlike me' who are either poor or rich, are much more affected by the different styles, so I feel it's safe to leave it to them to give a crap about it.
But now is not one of those times. It seems to me that you have to pick a clear strategy - a strategy of taking 2 contrasting strategies and running the middle line, is a bad strategy.
Internally I see 2 main strategies. Either the government tries to make up for the shortfall in international demand by creating local demand, or it pulls back completely and just tries to be a miser to ride the bad times out. You can't do both.
The first strategy carries with it the hope that we could actually ride the depression out without too much suffering. It is a socialist strategy. What suffering there is will be shared.
The second strategy abandons that hope as hopeless. It premises itself on the idea that the first strategy can only lead to a deeper depression, that it can only delay the inevitable reckoning. It therefore seeks to take what is still good about the economy and make it work, and cut the rest loose. If it has a grand vision, that vision is that the depression will somehow be shortened by this kind of 'discipline'.
I'm looking very big picture here. The exact details of how an active government can stimulate internal demand have many many angles. Should they spend money, just to churn the money around? Or should they let people have more money via tax cuts, to do the same thing? Which would work better?
Then there are the external economic questions, which are driving the entire mess. A worldwide slump is leading to reduced demand for exported goods (and local goods too, I guess). Can anything NZ does help here? Can we try holding our dollar down? We're already very unrestricted in our trade. Should we be trying to control capital flows more? Should we be stockpiling reserves? I really don't know the answer. Everything seems risky to me. Do we have to just suck on it? That seems to be the consensus between the big parties. It's probably realistic, IMHO.
Speaking personally, my answer to the depression is to tighten and save. Pay off debt. But I don't think that is good for the economy. That's not putting money into any other NZers pocket. All the small traders will suffer the most, as the tightening applies first to all luxuries. I will not, for instance, buy a fancy HD entertainment system this year, which means some retailer loses out, and they won't get to spend the money they would have made from me on anything else, and so on all through the economy.Which is what makes me think that Kiwisaver is NOT going to help NZ through this crisis. It seems like a really good idea for every individual who joins up with it, and in many ways a very bad idea if everyone joins into it. Capitalism can't have everyone being rich, with huge savings, it just won't work like that.
Tax cuts seem to be the same. Most of them will just be plowed into savings of various kinds. Which will benefit the individuals and hurt the system (hurting the individuals in the process, some much more than others).
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How can you have a blue cloud James? Apart from anything else, it would very difficult to see against the background.
So how do you know there aren't blue clouds? Maybe there's lots of them, but you've always mistaken them for part of the sky.
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How can you have a blue cloud James? Apart from anything else, it would very difficult to see against the background.
It would be pretty obvious on an otherwise overcast day, if all the rest of the clouds were grey. or orange for that matter. I'm not sure what an orange cloud would be symbolic of, however.
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I'm not sure what an orange cloud would be symbolic of, however.
I'm guessing sunset. Or the apocalypse.
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I'm not sure what an orange cloud would be symbolic of, however.
I'd probably invest in a badass umbrella (ella ella! ehh ehh ehh!... ahem, sorry, damn Rihanna-brain) at that point.
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Aha! So you have some goods on them.
Or they on him.. :)
I already said Yay on another thread, but it bears repeating.
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Danielle, you've reactivated that spectacularly successful earworm again..
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I don’t trust or distrust John Key. His agenda is pretty straightforward, and he’s made enough commitments to lock himself into a centrist agenda for the first term. He’s shown with his coalition deals that he’s aiming to be there for a while, and if there’s anything I trust, it’s that Key ambition for a second- and third-term will keep anything radical off the agenda.
I'd have agreed until I thought a bit more about the lunatic-fringe stuff Act managed to get into its support agreement.
In particular, National agreeing to take on Act's Taxpayers Bill of Rights as a government bill. We have real-world data on what a truly horrible and dangerous idea that is, thanks to Colorado.
People who blather on about how government should be run like a business should take note: any business run according to an arbitrary rule that forbids either investment in capacity or the replenishing of reserves at times when revenue is good will eventually fail. That's what TABOR does.
Tim Watkin noted:
As Bernard Hickey has written on the Stuff website, "It would effectively do for fiscal policy what the Reserve Bank Act did for monetary policy. It would be one way to take the politicians out of government". Me, I quite like politicians in my government. I think it's called democracy.
Gordon Campbell has more on TABOR.
Fran O'Sullivan wrote yesterday that Bill English was not at all happy with Act's policy brinksmanship, and it appeared at one point that there would be no agreement possible. So there's your faultline there.
If National were to dump Act in two years' time, I'd be tempted to vote for them in a glorious act of schadenfreude.
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If National were to dump Act in two years' time,
If National dumps Act and runs a strong candidate in Epsom, I'm not sure Act gets back into Parliament. I'm sure it will get mentioned in the odd heated meeting.
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If National were to dump Act in two years' time, I'd be tempted to vote for them in a glorious act of schadenfreude.
Oh, the wailing there would be from some quarters. How can we make it so?
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Ah but would you be prepared to move to the arid wastelands of Epsom?
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I'm beginning to wonder if the title to this thread was not sarcastic. No one does actually want to talk about the economy. I guess we leave it to the Nats to work out then, eh?
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Ben,
No-one listens to us out here anyway ;)
Why waste breath when those that can possibly affect things have already made up their minds, and those that care but can't affect things become paralysed with cynicism and ennui.
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