It’s none of my business, really, but I quite like the budget. I teach Tuesday nights and don’t get home till too late so only get a vague sense on the night. Today the stories are filtered through the media so I have to decide whose judgements I will trust. Fact is, I don’t trust any of them, but this was my favourite. From Ross Gittens:

This is the budget of a badly rattled government that has put self preservation ahead of economic responsibility.

So what does this economic guru think is missing?

The biggest miss is increased spending on infrastructure, mainly because the Reserve Bank’s interest rate cuts are becoming ever less effective in getting the economy moving. Increased infrastructure spending would not affect the main medium-term objective of eliminating the recurrent budget deficit.

Such Keynesian mind-swill! The economy will turn around, ever so slowly. But to be surprised that lower interest rates provide no momentum to an economy is merely to demonstrate a lack of understanding how an economy works. And then to think that more infrastructure spending – NBN? pink batts? BER? – is needed makes me wonder whether it is ever possible to learn from the failings of the past.

To be surprised that the budget is a political document designed to get a government re-elected is kind of odd, a perspective shared by Paul Kelly, Budget 2015: Real aim is to save the Coalition. I’m all for budgets that edge the economy towards improvement. We are getting closer to the next election, and personally, I don’t want our economic problems solved before then. Costello left behind an economy of such golden prospects that it required all the ingenuity of Rudd-Gillard-Swan to ruin it. But they did. Why fix it right away so that the Shorten-Plibersek hammers can be applied. Let them fight the next election about how they would fix what is wrong, specially if they try to complain about the deficits they created and would not allow to be fixed.

Everything about the budget was aimed towards value adding. Almost no freebies for the non-working, non-productive. Almost everything is designed to encourage businesses to produce and invest, and for individuals to work and earn. The deficits can wait for after 2016.

And I just might mention this story from The Age which I also think is a portend in the right direction: Wages grow at slowest pace since ABS began quarterly records. It’s still 2.3% so not nothing, but also not rising as we would like. But it requires productivity to rise for real wages to rise. That is being nurtured. A very well structured budget that deserves the success that I am hopeful it will have.