I saw this at Andrew Bolt and it is absolutely perfect. Labor’s Catherine King claims government spending isn’t the same as taxpayers’ spending. Here are the quotes which could be made by anyone on the Labor front bench (and by all too many in the Coalition):

Is healthcare important in this country? Yes it is. Who pays for it? We think it is perfectly possible … for the government to continue to contribute alongside our taxpayers as they do both through the Medicare levy, Medicare levy surcharge and of course through general taxation to continue to have a sustainable Medicare system. . . .

When the Government points out that the co-payment will at least pay for a new $20 billion medical research fund, Labor health spokeswoman Catherine King tells the Government to keep the fund but ditch the tax to pay for it, claiming the Government could somehow “find the money from consolidated revenue”. You know, the great big money pot that magically refills?

One of the many problems that have been caused by Keynesian theory is to have substituted thinking in terms of money for thinking in terms of productive inputs. She sees no end to the money tree. Just keep printing and we can have everything. What she misses are the severe limitations on the productive real side of the economy.

Yet the undeniable fact is that there are a finite number of doctor-hours available across the economy, and these can only be expanded, over time, by reducing the number of other-profession-hours available. And there are only so many nurses-hours available and hospital-bed-nights available and ambulance-hours available, with none of these expandable other than incrementally and at huge cost in the other things we might do instead, like build schools, or roads, or trains, or submarines or anything else, like medical research, let us say.

I suspect that she and her colleagues are so dazzled by the billions they get to spend that they think there are no limits that matter. The reality is that she is so out of her depth, like so many of her colleagues, that they end up creating the fiscal mess that Julia and Kevin have left behind. It is a scandal, of course, but the level of economic education is now so low that even half the economists we graduate would not be able to immediately see the flaws in the arguments Catherine has made.