Posts by Keith Ng
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Plus, some people working in buildings not too far from Parliament might be stuck on IE8 and, heaven help them, XP, although not from choice.
You poor saps can view the IE compatible one I made: http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/budget-2011/budget-multimedia.
To be honest, I made this one only because I was sick of having to make shit work in IE. The fix invariably involves disabling AWESOME.
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Dear People: Chrome is superfast. Kicks the pants off Firefox 4.
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OnPoint: Everything has changed until 2014, in reply to Bart Janssen,
But pardon me for being simplistic here, but couldn't you - like - increase government revenue?
Yes. But what if half the voting population never accepts spending cuts and the other half never accepts tax hikes? Then we get exactly what we got for the past five years.
All I'm saying is that we moderate our opposition, and be prepared to concede *something*. Because the solution that we disagree with is better than no solution at all.
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OnPoint: Everything has changed until 2014, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Why? We're 7th lowest in the OECD for government debt. We're in a recession. In a recession, the government should borrow to get out of it (and in a boom, it should pay down those borrowings, exactly as the last Labour government did).
Yes, the need to reduce our debt is not pressing now. But if we don't reduce our deficit now, we'll have no room to respond to the aging population. Yes, it'd be best to have done this in 2005, but we didn't. Because when we're rich, we think we're going to be rich forever and nobody wants to save.
This is why the opportunity now seems like the best opportunity we're ever going to get.
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OnPoint: Everything has changed until 2014, in reply to Sacha,
And if we're looking for large amounts of state spending to shift, how about the massive subsidies to ETS polluters, continued propping up of property speculators and top-skewed personal tax cuts that have produced totally predictable results..
Absolutely. I think that's a productive way of engaging. I'd be quite happy if Labour started pushing for this stuff.
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The necessity of cuts for deficit reduction is not a premise I accept. There's money around, it's just distributed differently than it was 3 years ago.
There is.
Please explain how slashing state spending will fix private sector debt levels.
It won't.
We don't have a short-term debt crisis. But we do have a structural deficit that we can't afford in the medium term, and an aging population that we simply haven't done enough to prepare for.
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The government has screwed up its books and created a permanent structural deficit by giving away tax cuts to the rich. Its time they were reversed.
That's not fair - Labour's last few budgets were to blame as well. Nor is last-in, first-out a reasonable way to decide which policies to ditch.
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OnPoint: On Price Gouging, in reply to Ben Winters,
Oops, sorry Ben. Didn't see your big post. Apologies for reviving stuff that's been hashed out.
First hording occurs because people can see the market is not being allowed to clear and they correctly foresee shortage occurring.
People hoard if they *expect* a shortage. They cannot know, when they are hoarding, if they are correct or not.
You argue that makes petrol demand inelastic, and if allowed to go free the price will rise enormously. How do you know?
Because people queue for hours to get it.
The fundamental mistake you are making is to see price increase as immoral or opportunistic, rather than the automatic and fundamentally useful response to shortage.
People feel that receiving a windfall as a result of tragedy is unjust - it's not a moral prescription, just a statement on how human beings are wired. Don't take it up with me, take it up with evolutionary psychology.
I’m disappointed and mildly surprised so few commenters seem to subscribe to this view. It is entirely consistent with compassion and being human to argue for the allocation mechanism that gets an important resource in short supply to where it is most needed. Keith you put all the fundamentals in place, and them abandon them to assert but not show the merit of nonprice rationing.
As I said, first-come-first-served is not a good solution. But this doesn't mean that price rationing is good, or even better. It is inherently inequitable, and its impact on social cohesion has very tangible flow-on effects.
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OnPoint: On Price Gouging, in reply to Lew Stoddart,
Since he's now gone and written it, yous should probably consider reading Eric's response, in which he makes his case with considerably more nuance.
Finally figured out the concept I've been looking for this whole time: Income elasticity of demand. aka Rich people can pay more, and we have a friggin' graph to prove it.
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OnPoint: On Price Gouging, in reply to Paul Campbell,
An acquaintance told me of her son and his flatmates who are being evicted - they're students at Canterbury - several of them had just finished jobs for companies in the CBD that just plain don't exist any more - they haven't been paid - and the Uni isn't processing student loans etc - they can't pay their collective rent so their landlord has given them notice - their scummy flat is still standing and I guess he can get a lot more from desperate refugees
Sounds like a job for student media! Can I put them in touch with student media? Email me at keith at point dot org dot nz.