There is literally only a single economics text in the world that will tell you that for public spending to create jobs – any spending for that matter – it must be value adding. It is obvious and really only common sense but it is also a long-suppressed truth that is bringing us to ruin across the economies of the West. In the old days it was commonly understood that demand is constituted by supply, that to increase demand across an economy you first had to raise the level of value adding supply, a notion all but gone from economics since 1936. But here, picked up at Andrew Bolt, is Don Argus saying what is never normally said. Andrew’s heading is “Argus: this debt is dangerous, and bought us trash”. Exactly so!

The problem is that Australia’s debt accumulation did not deliver the optimal returns. There has been little infrastructure investment through the so-called boom, and remedial measures undertaken like stimulus cash payments and pink batts do not produce any ongoing return…

But one could conclude we have an emerging problem in this country that sizeable projects have not been subject to rigorous, publically disclosed cost-benefit analysis. The NBN is the most notable example of this, and the Government appears to have gone to great lengths to conceal its Budget impact.

Argus’s entire article can be found here.