Posts by Keith Ng
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Long on bean counting, short on vision and driven by the Treasury. I don't know why people bother voting for National, all they do is elect a bunch of pin stripes from the Terrace.
Hey, don't fall into the trap of dismissing experts when you disagree with them. Otherwise, all you've got to work on is truthiness.
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Spending growth will in fact be negative in real terms (and going backwards as a percentage of GDP). So someone in fact got more than their "cap spending at inflation" demand.
Yes. But it can't go up forever, right? So the fact that it's coming down is not necessarily catastrophic.
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firstly, that graph assumes no growth forever, right? If we can actually recover from this recession, then we'd expect debt to fall.
No, it doesn't assume that, but if growth was better than expected, then yes, the debt position will become better.
secondly, 60% debt/GDP would only put us where most developed nations are now. Why should we be the only ones with tiny government debt, how does it help us?
Because it's not just public (government) debt that counts, it's a combination of public and private. It's the total that matters. High debt means that more money goes overseas to service our debts (public and private), which worsen our current account deficit, increasing the cost of borrowing, our exposure to international credit markets, etc.
Debt is bad. Not worse-than-Hitler bad, but it's not a trivial issue that only matters for high-flying/falling financiers.
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Shouldn't it be $88 billion plus the interest accruing on that debt? So there may be even bigger spending cuts ahead?
Nope. It's $88b of savings, rather than debt, so it goes the other way.
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Personal experience has shown that motorways are excellent enablers of crime. They are particularly handy, for example, if you wish to evade police cars by driving against the flow of traffic at high speeds in a stolen vehicle.
Not with the congestion projected by 2015... maybe if you were on a motorcycle. Or a monster truck.
(I should probably point out that I mean in Grand Theft Auto, right?)
If you want to drive against the flow of traffic at (well, moderate) speeds, you don't need a motorway. You just need a firetruck. Or a tank. That works well too.
Mmmm. I think that just pushed me over the edge into getting GTA IV.
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Oh noes! They're all headed for Devonport.
Not quite. See Douglas Adams' Standard Model Intrepretation of Ring Route Dynamics:
"He had extracted himself from the Cambridge one-way system by the usual method, which involved going round and round it faster and faster until he achieved a sort of escape velocity and flew off at a tangent in a random direction."
But since the energy potential for the Western Ring Route is so much larger, by my calculations, you may emerge inside the LHC. Or somewhere in northern Chile. Meh. That's quantum physics for you.
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Mt Albert is the home of "working families". The people of Te Aro neither work, nor have families.
Goddamn hippies. Get a haircut!
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I don't think I've seen a more cynical Govt. At the time they are putting a candidate up for election they shit on the electorate. How does this work? Could it be that they knew they weren't going to win the seat but wanted to know how far they can push the people before they start losing credibility?.
To be fair, actively obliterating their own campaign is cold, but not cynical.
And I really think that this is all about the future extensions they can put on a surface option, which would be much more difficult with either the tunnels or the cut-and-cover.
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Wellingtonians will remember the Bypass, how it was fought for decades - with a fair amount of direct action in the final years. I helped a few people lock themselves to things. That was a bitter one.
The difference was that heaps of land in Aro had been designated for ages - which means fewer people, more dilapidated buildings. Big chunks of it were dead long before the final clear-out, and the residents who were left were mostly hippies and students. There weren't enough owner-occupiers, nuclear families... so I guess the problem was that the battle was lost a long time ago, and the final years were pretty futile.
So the lesson is start early, dig in hard?
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how about we take the Arthur Dent option and put some serious non-violent direct action in front of these bulldozers?
Will take years for the bulldozers to arrive. In the meantime, protesters might have to settle for running in front of surveyers' levels.