NO MATTER WHAT YOUR POLITICAL LEANINGS.


Quoted by: Ross Greenwood of Money News.

Right now the Federal Government is at pains to tell everyone - including us the mug-punters and the International Monetary Fund that it will not exceed its own, self-imposed, borrowing limits.
How much? $200 billion. And here's a worry.
If you work in a bank's money market operation; or if you are a politician; the millions turn into billions and it rolls off the tip of the tongue a bit too easily.
But every dollar that is borrowed, some time, has to be repaid. By you, by me and by the rest of the country.

Just after 5 o'clock tonight I did a bit of maths for Jason Morrison.
But it's so staggering its worth repeating now. First though; here's what Chairman Rudd has been saying about - what he calls - these temporary borrowings.
Remember those words: Temporary Deficit. But the total Government debt could end up around $200 billion.
So here's a very basic calculation ... I used a home loan calculator to work it out ... it's that simple. $200 billion is $200,000 million.
The current 10 year Government bond rate is 4.67 per cent. I worked the loan out over a period of 20 years.
Now here's where it gets scary ... really scary. The repayments on $200 billion come to more than one and a quarter billion dollars - every month - for 20 years.
It works out we - as taxpayers - will be repaying $154 billion in interest and principal every year ...$733 for every man woman and child - every year.
The total interest bill over the 20 years is - get this - $108 billion. Remember, this is a Government that just 18 months ago had NO debt.
NO debt.
In fact it had enough money to create the Future Fund to pay the future liabilities of public servants' superannuation ... and it had enough to stick $20 billion into the Building Australia Fund last year.
He continues ... a note that was sent to me which explains that the six leading members of the Government from Mr. Rudd down, the top six have a collective work experience of 181 years, but only 13 in the private sector.
If you take out of those 13 years the number that were spent as trade union lawyers, that total 11, of the 181 years only two years were spent in the private sector.
So the people who will rack up a net Federal debt of a minimum of $188 billion, the highest in our history, have virtually no experience in business.
So out of those 181 years:
- no years spent running their own business
- no years spent starting their own business
- no years spent as a director of a family business or a company
- no years as a director of a public company
- no years in a senior position in a public company
- no years in a senior position in a private company
- no years working in corporate finance
- no years in corporate or business restructuring
- no years working in or with a bank
- no years of experience in the capital markets
- no years in a stock-broking firm
- no years in negotiating debt facilities with banks
- no years running a small business
- no years at the World Bank or IMF or OECD
- no years in Treasury or Finance.


But these people have plunged Australia into unprecedented debt, and now threaten to torpedo employee share schemes which they plainly don't understand.
Well, in a way you can't blame them. It's clear the electorate did not do their homework, because the Goverment is there by right.

That's just one of many stupid things governments do to us, but until you figure out how to install a better system of government you won't be able to fix the problems. Our in-house liberal party stooge evidently delights in linking problems to names like rudd, oblivious to the fact that it's our system that is at fault, not individual players.

I'm not really a defender of Kevin Rudd, but let's balance up that story with this one:

http://www.afr.com/p/national/economy/australian_economy_envy_of_developed_9XiSdeRtZbwAxeNzcM4c9H

How much would it have cost Australia overall without the stimulus package? What is the cost of a jobless rate (OECD average) of 8.7% compared to the Australian jobless rate of 5.2 or 5.3% ?

I'm not saying that the stimulus package was entirely the cause of this -  the main factor was the Chinese economy, but we're not the only economy in the world that relies heavily on the Chinese Economy.

The US had a jobless rate of about 9.8% on February's figures.

hi muso - you are a balanced poster.
not that i see why you should be !!!!!!!!



Quote:

THINK you must now have heard the worst of Kevin Rudd’s colossal waste of your billions? Think nothing could top Rudd’s spending $1.5 billion on free insulation so dodgy that he must spend an estimated $450 million more to pull it out or make it safe? Then check out this shack above. It’s actually a school library being built at Stuarts Point with cash from perhaps the most scandalously wasteful of all the Rudd Government’s “stimulus” packages. How much would you pay for it, do you think? $150,000? $200,000, tops? Ha! Try $931,000, sucker. And that’s out of your pocket, too. For a contrast, check what you’d get for less than a quarter of the price if the school had cut out the Government middlemen and simply picked a whole house off the shelf from a builder. Ezyhomes, for instance, offers a 182sq m house called the Outlook (below), with a huge central area just right for a reading or teaching area, as well as three bedrooms you could use for the books, or knock out to make bigger spaces. Add toilets, kitchen and veranda and you’d still have change from $220,000. Or check what the Australian Construction Handbook of 2008 says you should actually pay for a single-storey primary school building - around $1300 per square metre, actually, or about a tenth of what Stuarts Point’s library costs. This is not a lone example, either. All round the country you’ll find the same astonishingly inflated prices for buildings knocked up in a hurry under rush-rush-Rudd’s Building the Education Revolution, set up last year to hurl $16.2 billion into quick-quick building projects for schools to “save” us from a catastrophic recession that the Reserve Bank now admits was just one of our milder downturns. This waste is worst in the $14 billion of that money that went on primary schools, which were given just a couple of months to ask for, plan and start building their choice of hall, library, shade or classroom. And what you saw with Rudd’s disastrous free insulation scheme is now unfolding with these BER projects. Too much money chased too few builders, who naturally quoted mad prices for jobs they barely cared if they didn’t get. So Eungai Public School in NSW spent $850,000 for just a two-room classroom. Berwick Lodge Primary, in Victoria, was quoted $200,000 by a Government project manager to move a sewer and stormwater drain - more than three times what private contractors told the principal the job was worth. A Wollongong school couldn’t even buy a school hall for its $2.5 million, even though the one it was quoted was less than half the size of the hall a nearby Catholic school had built for half the price. Nor does this scandal stop at the overcharging. Many schools asked for or were offered buildings they didn’t really need, and said yes only for fear of missing out on a freebie. For instance, Yapeen Primary School, near Castlemaine, was given $150,000 of BER money even though it has just two students and may soon close. Coincidentally, perhaps, the principal has twice stood as a Labor candidate. The reports of overcharging and waste in this massive program, administered by Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, are so overwhelming that the auditor-general is now investigating where the money went, and is also asking primary school principals to say in confidence whether they got value for these billions. I’m yet to speak to a builder who thinks they did. “I’d say a figure of $1000 a sq m is a very good ball-park figure (for school buildings),” the prominent head of one of the country’s biggest home builders told me, asking not to be identified. “The price for this Building the Education Revolution stuff is phenomenally much higher than that. There’s been a feeding frenzy and people could charge what they liked. “You could get a couple of houses off the shelf for a fraction of the price of what they’re paying for (a small library).” The Opposition estimates that of the $16.2 billion being spent, as much as $9 billion will be frittered away, and no one can be sure that’s not just spin. After all, this Government’s mismanagement of spending already rivals anything Gough Whitlam ever perpetrated.

http://blogs.news.com.au/couriermail/andrewbolt/index.php/couriermail/comments/column_how_rudd_blows_your_billions/

More copy and paste; no solutions, as usual from our in-house liberal party stooge.

fawkes wrote on Mar 12^th, 2010 at 12:08pm:

More copy and paste; no solutions, as usual from our in-house liberal party stooge.

What's this mania about solutions?!? This is a web forum with 8 and a half regulars. Are you really here for actual political solutions?

Soren wrote on Mar 12^th, 2010 at 8:03pm:

This is a web forum with 8 and a half regulars.

I didn't know that when I first started posting. Have you asked yourselves why more don't join you?  Perhaps it's because, like me, they find aimless chatter a boring waste of time.

Quote:

Have you asked yourselves why more don't join you?

Perhaps because this is an obscure internet forum with no advertising and no proper main page specializing in discussion regarding a fairly niche subject that is already covered by many other places on the internet already?

aikmann4 wrote on Mar 12^th, 2010 at 9:44pm:

Perhaps because this is an obscure internet forum with no advertising

It's only a little bit obscure. For instance, in a Google search for an "Australian political forum" it comes up top of the list, which is good as almost any advertising you can get. The layout of the forum and the software that drives it are as good as any. And although there are plenty of political comment sites, only a few of them are Australian, and even fewer allow subscribers to start up new topics themselves. What is missing is a wide range of sensible comment.

fawkes wrote on Mar 13^th, 2010 at 7:55am:

It's only a little bit obscure. For instance, in a Google search for an "Australian political forum" it comes up top of the list, which is good as almost any advertising you can get.

Hahaha, that's exactly how I ended up here. And I don't think that sprint needs to provide solutions for there to be a topic on the issue. Bringing the issue to attention is enough for a debate.

fawkes wrote on Mar 13^th, 2010 at 7:55am:

aikmann4 wrote on Mar 12th, 2010 at 9:44pm: Perhaps because this is an obscure internet forum with no advertising It's only a little bit obscure. For instance, in a Google search for an "Australian political forum" it comes up top of the list, which is good as almost any advertising you can get. The layout of the forum and the software that drives it are as good as any. And although there are plenty of political comment sites, only a few of them are Australian, and even fewer allow subscribers to start up new topics themselves. What is missing is a wide range of sensible comment.

But most political discussions wherever you may find them do not pertain to talking about "solutions to problems" or whatever your primary complaint with this forum is. They're about bitching over the current state of things or arguing with others in an attempt to show them that they're wrong or dumb. If there is a reason people don't register here in greater numbers your given reason is not it.