Over Fifty Australian Economists Agree Fiscal Stimulus Prevented A Major Recession
Nobel Laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz has stated publicly that the Australian Fiscal Stimulus was a well designed package that saved the Australian economy from a major recession that has hit almost all the other OECD economies. He argued that the Australian package was a model for other economies facing similar problems.
The attached letter was signed by over fifty academic economists. Several other academics and economists supported this view about the Fiscal Stimulus Package that prevented the Australian economy from a deep recession and prevented a massive increase in unemployment.
The Australian economy has come out of the Global Financial Crisis in surprisingly good shape thanks to this Stimulus Package.
The Australian unemployment rate is amongst the lowest of any of the OECD economies.
Unlike the US and Europe, we are not facing the possibility of a double dip recession.
The current level of government debt (the lowest in the OECD economies) is due to tax revenues falling during a slow-down in the economy, whilst social security payments increase. Most of the increase in the debt would have happened independently of the increased government expenditures associated with the Stimulus Package.
The Stimulus Package has led to an increase in infrastructure investment that would help the long-term development of the Australian Economy.
John Quiggin 
The PM who was the driving force behind that fiscal package so lauded in the open letter is no longer in the saddle. Rudd totally dominated the direction of his government.
How can there be any assurance that there will be the same macroeconomic stewardship by the pretenders and opportunists that deposed Rudd?
A leading ALP criticism of the mad monk by Rudd’s assassins is as fiscal conservatives. The mad monk is said to spending a promised $1 billion a day.
Was not the aim of the open letter to stop the election of a fiscal conservative?
Gillard specifically identified herself as a fiscal conservative at the start of the campaign and as someone who runs a hard ruler over any spending proposal that goes before cabinet. The real Julia opposed key parts of the lauded fiscal package such as the multibillion dollar payment to pensioners.
Who are the fiscal conservatives in the current campaign?
The criterion should be who will be more willing to use fiscal policy as a stablisation tool in the future. Its most recent champion was slain by the dragons in one night 2 months ago!
@Jim Rose
Nice use of overly emotive language Jim. Your fact-opinion and fact-inference confusion raised a giggle, but the quality of the post means I’m going to ignore it. Surely you can do better.
@matt
Leaders matters!
• Would Beazley have won in 2007?
• Would the Liberals have done better if Howard retired before 2007?
• Would Labour stand a better chance now if Rudd was still PM?
• Would a president Obama be interchangeable with a president Hilary?
Leaders are deposed to set new political directions, which are the reasons given by the real Julia for deposing Kevin07.
As I understand it the overall stimulus figure was $42bill, near enough to the full price of an NBN superhighway for us all. That raises in my mind the obvious question as to why a moving forward Labor Govt didn’t seize the moment, enter into emergency talks with Telstra to buy their network as they did recently and roll out their brilliant ‘Snowy Scheme’ NBN for us all? After all it was a national scheme to spread the stimulus around very broadly and even involve our Future Fund in such productive and necessary infrastructure. The added bonus would have been a surprise 1GB/sec for so many by now.
I must say I didn’t hear a peep out of the 55 economists at the time about that sort of stimulus, but perhaps they’d like to comment here on Westpac’s letter to borrowers today that their mortgages are to rise by 0.25% as of Oct10, due to a combination of the rising cost of market funds and the RBA’s official hike in April/May.
Prof, glad to see your support for the stimulus package. In my view it was money well spent. The cost of increased income support payments (and reduction of income tax) arising from an increase in unemployment of 200,000 would probably have been a couple of per cent of GDP. I was working in government in 1990-91 when the Hawke government tried to address the recession, and they took too long. The social cost was massive (and we now have a bloated population on disability support as a consequence), and the Working Nation package in 1994 was too late. We are a mixed economy, and the largest player in the economy – the federal government – can play a big role in handling the major shocks to the economy.
Glad to see the support of the fifty economists here, many very senior, on the need for the fiscal stimulus, post GFC. It is as much about getting the truth of the matter out there – our recovery relative to many other OECD countries. Australia took action quickly. Yes it does reflect well on the the labor governments efforts at that time and they do deserve to be praised.
JR – your less than humble, as usual, commentary pales into insignificance. The Coalition have shown themselves to have only one policy for all economic seasons – that is to hoard as much of our taxes as they can and spend as little of it as they can on infrastructure. We are just fortunate that the surplus impounded in the future fund did not lose too much in the GFC although I feel I may be yet to hear the full facts on that.
@Jim Rose
Wow. You’re like a walking sound-bite. It seems you can’t do better. Good luck with that. I’ll not bog PrQ’s comments section down with inane chit chat, hopefully you won’t either.
I wouldn’t say the coalition hoard as much revenue as they can. Therr are a lot of votes that can be bought and infrastructure investment for some sectors of the economy was “booming”.
If I recall correctly this is not the first time a collection of respected economists have performed this sort of action (the letter). I might be cynical but I doubt if this is going to get any significant coverage in widely viewed media.
“Over Fifty Australian Economists Agree…”.
If that isn’t an argument from authority, I’ve never heard one. (JQ once accused me of making one, in relation to naval matters, even though I linked to the supporting material and sources so they could be checked or questions emailed to them; it’s the merely saying that there are supports with nothing else that makes an argument from authority.)
The best economists’ letter of this sort I ever came across was in the newspapers many years ago, when Britain was about to join the (then) EEC. First there was a letter signed by many economists saying that they thought joining was a very bad idea, and then a day later there was another letter signed by many economists saying that they thought joining was a very good idea (or that may have the first letter – I don’t recall precisely). Finally, on the third day, there appeared the letter I really liked: a letter signed by many economists saying that they hadn’t the faintest idea whether joining was a good idea or not.
Under the circumstances I do not place much weight on the authority of letters signed by economists, with nothing else to substantiate them. It would be quite another thing if they were to take us through whatever led them to their conclusions, but as it is…
@Alice
The best way to evaluate arguments about fiscal policy is to rely on literature dated before 2007 so there are no biases to win favour with willing audiences.
If you are to use fiscal policy, the long and variable lags argument applies.
These lags are longest and most variable for infrastructure spending. Also, as infrastructure spending is more likely to have public benefits, it is more likely to be a substitute for private spending, and thereby crowd private spending out.
It is curious that people point to outliers that favour their cases. Japan had a dozen or so fiscal stimuli and did not quickly motor out of their long recession.
@P.M.Lawrence
I disagree P M. the letter speaks for itself and takes us through the essence of what led to their agreement and signatures. If you want more detail you need to seek the research. I doubt whether Joseph Stiglitz would have come to the positive conslusion he did about the effectiveness of Australia’s response on intuition alone…..it is up to the informed to inform themselves and not ask to be led through reams of data in a blog?
@P.M.Lawrence
Well if you had listened to PM tonight …
@P.M.Lawrence
great example.
open letters on macroeconomic policy raraly bring to the surfacce the great divisions among economists.
there are at least seven schools of macroeconomic thought, and in their day, these schools agreed on little on the major and even minor issues. getting agreement on the causes of inflation would be a struggle.
@Jim Rose
Sorry JR – its such a sound and honest and important letter and Im so relieved to see all the signatures in agreement, not even you can engage (or is that enrage…?) me this time!
@Alice
Stiglitz!!
progressives are often the first to inquire into someone’s background to see who they took money from vested interests.
Stiglitz coauthored a paper in 2002 titled, Implications of the New Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Risk-Based Capital Standard. This stated that “on the basis of historical experience, the risk to the government from a potential default on GSE debt is effectively zero.” The study was commissioned by Fannie Mae.
Stiglitz today is an outspoken critic of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac risk-taking. According to Stiglitz, GSE risk-taking was a predictable consequence of the structure of the GSEs and their financial structure and compensation schedules.
It is good to see stiglitz adjusts his position in the light of new learning about crony Capitalism
That’s missing the point. Those who do that research are not getting their answers from letters like that, and contrariwise letters like that do not provide starting points for research of that sort. So, letters like that are arguments from authority. I have formed my own views from my own paying attention (particularly to the questions of timing I have seen raised); whether I am mistaken or not, a list of signatories does nothing to reinforce my views or dissuade me from them.
@Jim Rose
Which is rather the point – that any single letter of that sort isn’t really evidence or really argument.
How many of the 51 work in macro? I know old John Neville does but he is retired. Of the rest I wonder how many signed this not because they had good reasons for believing it is true but simply as an attempt to support Labor. Did Labor head office initiate this?
These kinds of public cheersquad statements seem to me quite inappropriate. They confuse the issues of having a political viewpoint and professional responsibility. There was groveling in the post to Joe Stiglitz who is a great economist but hardly an expert on Australia. But there is a broader type of insinuation that the Australian public should grovel to a group of experts many of whom have no expertise to make these sorts of judgements.
PM Lawrence, I have to disagree with you for reasons many of the undersigned are not your johnny come lately graduates but well established academics who reached their pinnacle after years of dedicated hard work.
@P.M.Lawrence
I await the letter from 50 Economists explaining how the Fiscal Stimulus Package didn’t prevent a major recession.
Jim Rose, dude, like man, jeeze, Japan? (Splutter, splutter.) Like, really not comparable to Australia. Oh how badly we wanted Japan to have a stimulus like what Australia done recently, but it never happened. Oh how the deflation ground in Japan, like teeth in meth addict’s mouth. Would have given someone else’s right arm for some real inflation in Japan. Instead the country ended up stuck to its guts in 100 yen stores and two for one hamburgers with cash greater than the GDP of most countries stuffed under peoples’ futons, while the official figures showed a whopping and one percent inflation that the officials seemed to be proud of.
I can’t let this pass without my traditional protest against the biased version of history being peddled by the economics profession, who notoriously “predict nine out of the past five recessions” (Samuelson).
This latest statement by economists continues the revision of history which has erased the contribution of Howard-Costello to the good management of the AUS economy over the noughties. It was the L/NP’s useful factoral, financial and fiscal policies that bequeathed a strong economy to ALP, who then played the good cards they were dealt in a competent fashion.
How many of these economists predicted a recession in any case? My sense was that Pr Q was fairly bearish 2008-09, although as usual he hedged his bets.
In OCT 2008, prior to the enactment of the fiscal stimulus, I correctly predicted that “a recession was odd-off”. This was because I could see the underlying state of the AUS economy and fiduciary was sound, largely due to more than a decade of prudent management of the economy by Treasury/RBA under the guidance of Costello/Macfarlane.
The post-modernist financial crisis starts in financial industry and then moves to real industry, the exact opposite of modernist financial crises. AUS banks banks did not suffer any great National Financial Crisis (NFC) after Lehman’s went belly up in mid-2008 and the GFC hit the rest of the OECD. Quite the opposite, in late 2008 they enjoyed a general upgrade in their global rankings.
This was mainly due to Howard’s phenomenal immigration-driven demand for housing putting a rock solid floor under property prices. No sub-prime fire sales therefore loans continued to perform and mortgages remained bluechip. Everywhere you looked there were Asian students being “packed to the rafters” in residential investment properties – THAT was what kept Aussie realty above water.
But so many economists preached “housing bubble” – including me in the early to mid-noughties – that they missed the reality on the street. I must admit that even I was shocked by the spectacular housing price increases in 2009-10, I thought property would at best (higher-bound) trade sideways for a year or so or at worst (lower-bound) drop by up to 10%. No way did I see 10%-20% price increases, which was clearly two years pent-up demand from 2007-09 being released in one year.
Added to Howard-Costello’s “factoral” stimulus (student demand for housing) was Macfarlane’s financial stimulus which started in MAR 2008, when the RBA started to cut interest rates, the cash rate being around 7% at the time. By JAN 2009, when the stimulus started to kick in, the cash rate was down to around 3%. That 4% interest rate cut on one trillion dollars mortgage debt alone injected around $40 billion cash into borrowers pockets over latter part of 2008 – much more timely than the fiscal stimulus.
And lets not forget that Costello did manage to put the budget back-into-black for most of the noughties. This bequeathed Swan a huge fiscal war chest which the government was able to use in financing its infrastructure spending.
So I would give at least two-thirds the credit for AUS’s good performance in the post-GFC period to Howard-Costello-Macafarlane, rather than Rudd-Swan-Stephens. But all the history of that period has been carefully flushed down the memory hole by media-academia, who tend to be myopic when not out-right biased against the L/NP.
And Joe Hockey is simply out of his depth in economics and unable to sell the L/NP’s fairly admirable economic crediential.
@Ronald Brak
Japan is a good example because it is supposed to be a liquidity trap, as the USA is said to be by I think Krugman, so fiscal policy should be especially potent. It was not.
John et al,
With reference to your statement that
“The current level of government debt (the lowest in the OECD economies) is due to tax revenues falling during a slow-down in the economy, whilst social security payments increase. Most of the increase in the debt would have happened independently of the increased government expenditures associated with the Stimulus Package.”,
can someone please explain to me just how the Libs can state in their ads that “Julia Gillard is borrowing $100 million a day? Where does that number come from?
@Jarvo
AIUI it’s a simple mathematical division (by day) of the projected budget deficit. It’s what happens when retail politics goes to a bar and spikes the drink being had by orthodox economics, hops into bed with it and produces a child in circumstances where economics can’t later attest to what happened.
I would like to see a dissection of what ‘saved’ Australia in terms of stimulus/mineral exports/low debt and other possible factors. As in 50% stimulus, 40% exports, 10% other for example. It’s hard not to notice that Australia exports huge amounts of coal and iron ore to Asia while the US and UK don’t. A follow on question is that if China and India demand less of Australia’s resources will more stimulus fill the gap.
@hc
HC says “But there is a broader type of insinuation that the Australian public should grovel to a group of experts”
part of the problem with the Coalition HC is that in recent years they have poo pooed many experts….and dont listen to them. Sort of “we know better than the experts” attitude.
The result of this is that the Coalition has lost credibility on many serious issues…not the least of which is “the economy”.
Oh and someone here was so tragically right. Fifty of our eminent Australian economists sign an open letter and how did that go in the media?
Well I count barely 8 seconds on the ABC news with the emphasis on “most of the economists are academics and some are from the union movement.” Interesting.
I didnt expect it to make Murodch news. I knew it would be first on the suppression of information list. I didnt expect it to get slotted in between the latest 14 year old singing prodigy who won the breaktrhrough award in the United States on channel nine.
But ABC?? Not even a read of the actual contents of the letter. I find it pretty pathetic that an important Australian letter actually signed by 50 of our Australian economists cant slug it out for an airing with a 14 year old child singing wonder from the United States and c an only raise 8 seconds on the ABC.
How many signatures would they like before it becomes news? 100? 1000? 5000?
Or does Australian news get decided as inferior to international gossip, by one or two CEOS, a couple of non economic editors and a handful of program managers.
What are the media thinking? This is not a political letter. Its a letter about sound economic policy – something the Coalition doesnt understand because they have made a career out of dismissing experts in many fields (not just economics).
I know. I know. The media wants us to go back to our love affair with masterchef, fill in our monopoly competition coupons and not think at all.
The media is part of the problem of why our politicians arent up to scratch.
Alice, Could you list from the letter, the experts in macroeconomics? The people who have studied the evidence and drawn the macroeconomic conclusions outlined in the letter. Or is it just – the economy didn’t go into a recession and Labor spent a lot so obviously the policy worked. Or even weaker – we back Labor so lets give them a leg up on this one.
Warwick McKibbin isn’t on the list – he is an expert who has studied the evidence and who would not agree with these claims.
Harry, if you are going to play the CV game, John Nevile is Australia’s pre-eminent expert on fiscal policy, much more distinguished in the field than his former student Warwick McKibbin.
I do question though why Steve Keen signed the letter. I thought he was on the record as opposing debt financed fiscal policy.
@hc
Battles of the open letters are common.
Response rates and margins of error are always useful on surveys of opinion such as how many of those asked responded at all, and how many agreed to sign.
The background of the signers and non-signers is useful too.
There are extensive surveys of the economic profession on their policy views and politics as compared to the general public. There is a survey by Fred argy of the Canberra branch of the economic society too.
In the USA, voters register as democrats, republicans and independents. There is a recent study by Ben Klein of the party registration of tenure-track faculty at 11 California universities showing the academia is over-represented by progressive registered voters compared to the general public but the one-party campus conjecture does not extend to all institutions or all departments
@Uncle Milton
Steve Keen is a neo-keynesian so why wouldn’t he? He was against housing bonus payments, IIRC.
First, the open letter seems to have utterly terrorised Jim Rose, et al.
Second, Keen’s approach to wastage would definitely have him on the list. Even if he may have unfolding long term debates on aspects of economy and pol economy afoot with other economists, on this question, he has assented.
It indicates that while he may have his own ideas framed in his own way, including for future remedy, he has assented to the initial diagnosis and treatment regime.
Three, the list includes largely NSW academics; I wager a quick trawl would find many other qualified people across the country also willing to sign; think of Fred Argy, et al
The Blowfly is happy to see so many qualified economists arguing over this subject. It is music to his funny little ears.
Undoubtedly the Coalition, if it had control of the levers during the GFC would’ve been subject to basically the same bureaucratic advice that Labor was. Sure a good Treasury honcho would’ve knocked some of the corners off tailoring it to “coalition philosophy’ —-whatever that is!.
But no-one seems to have dragged out of Abbott & Co what they would’ve done differently and when they would’ve done it.
And with all those economic models around someone would be able to evaluate how their ‘plans’ would’ve worked out.
The Blowfly believes that Costello would still be smiling about the fact that he was able to avoid the GFC by losing Government.
We should give credit where credit is due.
The Coalition’s policies and economic management helped us to weather the storm because they had paid off debt rather that invest in much needed infrastructure during their time in office.
This made it easier for the new government to handle the storm.
but the Coalition would’ve handled the GFC in basically the same fashion.
In this Abbott is hypocritical—-and demonstrates he a typical politician!
So the way The Blowfly sees it is that we could’ve had our infrastructure upgraded by the Coalition and be on our knees after the GFC because of the debt OR be in the situation we are in now.
Which would the Australian people prefer?
As the actress said to the Bishop: “Gee, that’s a hard one!”
We are where we are unfortunately and looking for some vision about how we improve the lot of our residents.
The only piece of vision appears to be the NBN.
Could there be more?
@Fran Barlow
I am sure he wrote that since the problem was created by too much debt, it can’t be fixed by a policy that creates more debt.
Harry, as I’ve argued in Zombie Economics, the last thirty years of macro theory have proved to be something of a dead end. So, I don’t think you need to be a macro specialist to endorse the standard, and well-tested conclusion of Keynesian macro, that fiscal policy can provide an effective stimulus under the appropriate conditions. And the judgement of virtually all the experts who had to actually make the decisions (Treasury departments, G20, IMF etc) was that the conditions were appropriate.
@jquiggin
Angus Deaton, in his Letter from America (published in the newsletter of the Royal Economic Society) provides an interesting anecdote about modern macro. He asked one of his colleagues who was teaching first year graduate macro, after the first class, what the students were like. Very good, replied the colleague. Why? Because they knew the conditions under which the infinite integral of discounted consumption utility converged.
Jim Rose, wow, you really don’t know what you are talking about. Here’s a graph of Japanese inflation:
http://www.google.com.au/imgres?imgurl=http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Inflation_rate_of_Japan_Economy_editted.png&imgrefurl=http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Inflation_rate_of_Japan_Economy_editted.png&usg=__h0WoNHenQlOGsayC_rXuRS8XZlw=&h=577&w=1031&sz=107&hl=en&start=0&tbnid=i0SrvuKfyP0LmM:&tbnh=100&tbnw=178&prev=/images%3Fq%3Djapan%2Binflation%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26hs%3Djfr%26sa%3DN%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26biw%3D1280%26bih%3D845%26tbs%3Disch:1&um=1&itbs=1&iact=hc&vpx=107&vpy=88&dur=3041&hovh=168&hovw=300&tx=146&ty=89&ei=ze9pTP_pJIawcavF8I8F&oei=ze9pTP_pJIawcavF8I8F&esq=1&page=1&ndsp=30&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0
So just where did Japan create the sustained inflation necessary to get out of a liquidity trap? The answer is it didn’t.
The crisis was unusual since it took the economy into a new sample space. No-one knew what was happening – international capital markets misjudged the fate of the Australian economy by punishing the Aussi dollar for example. The Labor government comes along and spends a lot of money. It could do this safely because we had no debt, almost no unemployment and no inflation. The situation in China proves much better than expected and Australia’s terms of trade continue to improve.
And, according to the letter, the expansionary fiscal actions of the Labor government are assumed to be responsible for Australia not dipping into recession? Maybe, but its a big call and others disagree. Or at least point to the other factors I mention.
Uncle Milton, I certainly didn’t intend to slight John Nevile who wisdom I have listened to over the years. Or for that matter to John Quiggin or Steve Dowrick. But I’ll stick with the tenor of my remark. The list was short on people working in macroeconomics.
@hc
Harry, you have to parse the letter. It doesn’t say that fiscal policy alone stopped the economy going into recession. It says government’s “co-ordinated policies” did. That could also include financial policies like the bank guarantees, which didn’t involve spending any money, as it turned out, but which were very important in enabling the banks to continue their daily borrowings from banks overseas.
It might also include monetary policy, though it would be incorrect (in my view) to count this as part of the government’s policies (given the operational independence of the RBA) but it is part of government policy.
Since one of the signatories hosts this blog, why not ask him?
@observa
because the NBN required highly specialised skills that are not sitting around idly. Rolling this out rapidly (very unlikely to be doable anyway) would not have helped the building and retail industries which employ large numbers of lower skilled workers. Rushing the NBN would have just pushed up the cost of the project, and the salaries of high-paid technical, project and management staff…
I notice Telstra shares dipping to historic lows recently. One of the fun things the government could do, perhaps if the shares fell below $2, would be to reacquire the shares and therewith, majority ownership. They could then do the structural separation and the NBN stuff they wanted a lot more neatly, and of course if they offered at that point to reacquire the rest, the government would have made a profit on the deal.
@Jack Strocchi
Aren’t you missing the point? There’s lots of other factors you could include. You might also include the Deng Xiaoping’s economic revolution in China that lead to Australia’s mineral boom in a recent economic history of Australia, but that’s not the nature or purpose of this document.
What is actually important is (1) that an appropriate stimulus occurred, (2) it worked, (3) it is seen to have worked, and, (4) the strategy is reused when it is appropriate. If you hadn’t noticed, the Liberal Party is currently running a campaign that claims, variously, that the stimulus was unnecessary, or too big, or contrary to good government, or various other things along those lines. While this may be oppositionism and/or ideological blather, and quite possibly, they would actually have done more-or-less the same thing if they were in government, there is actually a significant risk that the facts about the stimulus get lost in tribal mythologies and the option of a stimulus is lost in future. As I read it, this is exactly what has happened in the US: real economic analysis is pretty well subverted by ideology.
AFAICS that’s why the economists made the statement. The sort of people who trust the statements of qualified surgeons, aircraft designers, and civil engineers in their field of expertise will absorb this statement; ideologues, nut jobs, and people who imagine they know more than experts on all subjects will respond as per usual. Hopefully there is more of the former so that next time a stimulus is needed it isn’t prevented by accumulated misinformation.
(Don’t become an upmarket Jim Rose.)
“Rushing the NBN would have just pushed up the cost of the project, and the salaries of high-paid technical, project and management staff…”
Speaking as a highly paid technical staffer myself, I’m not exactly seeing a downside expressed in this statement 😛
I thought the letter of 50 was necessary, useful and timely.
If someone like Jim Rose is going to pretend that”open letters on macroeconomic policy rarely bring out great divisions among economists” then I am sure the opposite is the case.
As others have mentioned there was a great division among economists about Britain entering the (then) EEC, brought out but not resolved, in open letters.
Tony Makin’s efforts in response also show how a division has been brought out.
If another tribe of economists manage to get their email system working – we may yet see another letter, from the other side.
Of course all our capitalistic Keynsians are jumping for joy at the moment, and as their letter states;
The increase in Australian unemployment and deficits has been trivial ‘in comparison’.
Why this loose thread? What happens if capitalism requires another stimulus, and another stimulus, and another? What happens if unemployment continually ratchets up? What happens if debt continually ratchets up?
The fact that these macroeconomic ratchets may be, ‘less by comparison’ (with other regimes), becomes irrelevant.
If you can only have capitalism if you inject stimulus, and increase unemployment and debt, then capitalism is the real problem.
I will await the next open letter when (if) our economists tackle the Henry Reviews tragic proposal to cut company tax. This is an even greater threat to Australian society.
It’s ok guys, it turns out debt isn’t necessary at all! http://www.theage.com.au/federal-election/economy/well-fund-infrastructure-with-bonds-says-coalition-20100817-127r2.html
CM, all they’re proposing to do is to give a tax concession ($150m p.a.) to companies that borrow money to fund infrastructure that would have been built anyway – powerlines, water and sewerage treatment, etc.
Well, that was confusing. That was me replying to CM. I assume the stuff-up was mine, and not the software’s.
@Fran Barlow
You mean those Telstra shares that were sold as a great investment for the Mums and Dads of Australia – now dipping to historic lows in prices.
Well surprise, surprise – I know Murdoch made money on the roll out and you cant tell me the government didnt make money on flogging Telstra to the Mums and Dads of Australia.
Looks like the Mums and Dads got ripped off badly to me.
@hc
The names on the list HC are very well known in the economics profession…not to you perhaps, so I suggest you do your own CV trawling. Im not here to fill in gaps in your knowledge and as I see above you have one name who you think might not agree to this letter. Is that all??