According to MT, this will make 1000 posts on my weblog (for reasons i can’t figure out, it’s post #1005, but no matter). I did a word count on the file I exported from blogger and I’ve typed 250 000 words in a bit less than a year.
A much more conjectural question is the number of comments from readers. An average comment thread gets about 10, with a fair number of zeros offset by the occasional 30+ comments. So I’m going to claim 10 000 comments. Unfortunately, most of them are, if not lost, inaccessible. There are about 3000 in Haloscan’s database, if they haven’t been purged, and a lot more in the one c8to set up for me after I dumped Haloscan. While these are accessible in principle, there’s no easy way of reattaching them to the posts they belong to – a project for some later date perhaps. Older comments are gone for good with the site that hosted them.
Anyway, this is a good opportunity to thank all my readers, especially those who’ve bookmarked or linked to the new site, and invite anyone who hasn’t yet posted a comment to start doing so.
John Quiggin 
But again, does anyone know if anyone’s ever calculated/estimated what the budget situation would be today if Labor’s settings had remained in place?
Re Me No No’s question: An estimate can be made from the net new policy numbers in the Budget Papers (including (i) extrapolating the estimates beyond the 4 years for which there are forward estimates (ii) adding on the indirect impact on net interest payments). Such a calculation also assumes that the Tsy/Finace estimates of the costs of new policy are correct. This exercise suggests that the Budget in 02-03 would have been in surplus by a little over 2% of GDP more than the actual surplus ie rather than $3.9 billion, the surplus in the Budget Papers, it would have been around $18 or 19 billion. (I’m reading these numbers off a chart I have with me – the actual numbers are on a spreadsheet at home).
There are 3 main reasons for this gap – bracket creep, the spending in the 3 budgets from 99-00 to 01-02 (ie two GST related, one pre-election) and the conservative bias that is inherent in the forward estimates for the outyears (ie programmes with sunset clauses, or not fully indexed, or whatever). Of course, Labor wouldn’t have held on to such a large surplus, but the numbers do highlight that the tightening in the 96-97 Budget was well and truly reversed. Also, if national saving was part of the objective of the fiscal tightening, recall that close to $5 billion of the cuts were out of superannuation accounts (the co-payments and the surcharge).
We saw a Lateline program in a lecture the other night re blogging and you were featured.
As an MBA student, we have just started our first blog and it is good to have professional bloggers to refer to. It is a great way to get up to date information and allow interactivity at the same time. I am now a daily reader of your blog.
Shellie, I’m glad you like the blog. Be sure to tell your friends/fellow students to visit it.
1,000 posts? Bloody hell, I’ve managed less then 150 in a year…
it is good to have professional bloggers to refer to
In my opinion, they’re the least useful to refer to. I prefer the amateurs.