On the everlasting stagnation
Marcus Hicks writes: There will be no surplus, because even their newest predictions are still wildly optimistic. I predict we’ll be in a full-blown recession by this time next year.
Mark Dunstone writes: On wages we have been sold a lemon for years. We have had the rhetoric of the “clever country”, been implored to up-skill and improve our education, led to believe that the future holds high paid jobs with innovative industries, etc etc. But what have we really had? We continue to subsidise and encourage low wage, low skill industries. The government has a visa program that had been amazingly effective in keeping the returns to labour low and eliminating any incentive on businesses to shoulder some responsibility in training their labour force. We have an increasingly casualised workforce. Ministers talk of wage snobs, and increasingly people are being asked to work for nothing as “interns” etc. I suspect the economic returns to individuals from tertiary education, particularly if one counts wages forgone while studying as well as the HECS debt, is probably the lowest ever.
Malcolm Burr writes: Where to start? The Courier-Wail trumpeting rises in house prices in Brisbane as a good thing, television ads telling us that over 1 million (yes 1 million) Australian children go to bed hungry at night, the homeless rate is matching that of the United States. Australia led the world over a century ago, along with the 40 hour week in 1947. Oh how have the mighty fallen. Is it too late to rectify the damage caused by these economic vandals?
On Westpac’s apology
Mark A Zanker writes: Has it won me over? No way. The fact that it’s run by people who seem to be regarded as pillars of the community, who seem to be saying its nothing to worry about, sickens me. Compare the treatment of these people with those on the end of the robo-debt harassment by the government. The people living in grinding poverty on miserly government benefits are demonised, the people who cheat, lie and ignore corporate crime on a massive scale get away with it and get multi-million dollar bonuses as they walk away. How good is that!
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So how about calling for the repeal of the future tax giveaways? We have now discovered what we always knew, it was all a scam by those on six-digit incomes to line their pockets a little bit more.
Senators Stirling Griff and Rex Patrick and Jackie Lambie not only utterly destroyed the possibility of more and better services when they endorsed the recent $144 BILLION tax giveaway (in addition to the $150 BILLION already legislated), they destroyed the possibility of repeating the success of Labor’s 2008 stimulus package, or of easier provision of support funding should a general collapse in house prices threaten to drive a wave of evictions, or of action on the local impacts of global heating, any other of a lot of options. morrison’s “quiet Australians” / “smiling assassins” also killed the option to save their own jobs and incomes in that event.
For a photo of “Crossbench senators Rex Patrick, Jacqui Lambie and Stirling Griff celebrating after the passage of the [Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Relief So Working Australians Keep More Of Their Money)] Bill” see:
https://static.ffx.io/images/$width_728/t_resize_width/q_86%2Cf_auto/4e57de159820f094c6b1bad6ecc57273c5f4753a
Clever. Remind them, remind everyone you can, all day every day.
You say it all, but nobody will accept the blame for the million hungry kids, the 4 million living below the poverty line, the hundreds of thousand homeless, facebook or should I say Arsebook (because of all the shit posts that come out of it) has many people complaining about the cost of living, wage stagnation, yet none of these fools accept that it is they who are responsible, the conservatives cant steal your wages, rob the poor or take bribes from the greedy rich if they aren`t in government, its you stupid people who keep electing them and giving them the opportunity, its like holding the door open to let the robbers in, and frankly I`m getting sick of all the whining and whinging, personally I hope they screw the arse off all of you fools, you certainly deserve it, even some of these starving on newstart either voted for this corrupt mob or were just too bloody lazy to bother voting at all.
“Don’t you worry about that”, “How good is Australia”, “Strong, Strong Economy”.
As one commentator said of the election result, it was a triumph of BS over substance.
The economy is almost teetering on the brink of stopping and falling down.
Good one Smoko, enjoy your holiday whilst all of the volunteer fire fighters are burning through theirs.
Let us see how this government can bludge on a few more good citizens.