Our Treasurer last week described the Republicans in the United States, using the precise and diplomatic language he is known for, as “cranks and crazies”. Apparently he thought the Republicans were not taking America’s economic problems seriously, unlike say Barack Obama who apparently thinks US debt is around $10 trillion when it is in fact $16 trillion. Anyway, our Wayne thought it was the Republicans who were endangering the future of the American economy by trying to get some kind of debt ceiling in place which is why he used the phrase he did. He was then fully supported by the Prime Minister herself.

I have therefore had a look at this in an article now found at Quadrant Online which comes with the title, “Our Own ‘Cranks and Crazies'”. It begins:

Let me start with this. The justification for the mining tax was to ensure that the entire community would benefit from the minerals boom, the implication being that selling resources bestows no return to the rest of us outside the extractive industries and therefore requires a tax to share the wealth. But with the mining boom about to recede we are being told that, as a direct result, we will all have to get used to a lower standard of living. Absolutely right, but just as the loss of the mining boom has reduced everyone’s living standards, the boom, while it lasted, drove them higher.

Alas, our Prime Minister and her Treasurer were clueless about how we all benefit from growth, even in a single sector remote from our lives, and accordingly peddled one of the most ignorant and pernicious of all socialist memes: the resources of the nation belong to the people. The consequences of their tenure in office will be to our collective detriment for years to come as investors spurn putting their money into Australia, lest Labor return to the Treasury benches once again.

And this is the final para in which I focus on our Prime Minister and her Treasurer:

From the start they have never had much idea about what should be done and what needs doing. They have followed the socialist path of least resistance: re-empowering unions, spending money they don’t have, and because they have mismanaged our finances, leaving Australia literally defenceless in an increasingly dangerous world. The surest sign of Gillard and Swan’s poor judgment is that they can unselfconsciously go about calling others the very names most appropriately applicable to themselves.

If you would like to see what goes in the middle, you can read the whole article here.

The Government must be thinking about a March election, or even sooner, because they cannot possibly be serious that they will present a budget in May. Their latest fiscal horrors from The Australian:

WAYNE Swan has vowed deeper cuts to turn the budget around and post a surplus after last financial year’s deficit doubled to $43.7 billion from its original forecast 15 months ago.

Plunging company tax receipts contributed to the size of the deficit, slumping $876 million in the final two months of 2011-12.

The 2011-12 budget outcome, released by the Treasurer today, reveals a minor improvement in the final numbers compared to the May budget forecasts, with the underlying cash deficit coming in $661 million higher at $43.7 billion from $44.4 billion.

But despite the update, the final deficit is almost double the shortfall originally predicted in the May 2011-12 budget, when Mr Swan forecast a $22.6 billion deficit.

Let me start with this. The justification for the mining tax was to ensure that the entire community should be allowed to benefit from the minerals boom, the implication being that selling resources bestows no return to the rest of us outside the industry therefore requiring a tax. But now with the mining boom about to recede, we are being told that as a direct result we will all have to get used to a lower standard of living. Absolutely right, but just as the loss of the mining boom has reduced everyone’s living standards, the boom, while it lasted, drove them higher. Alas, our Prime Minister and her Treasurer were clueless about how we all benefit from growth even in a single sector remote from our lives, and accordingly peddled the most ignorant and pernicious of all socialist memes – the resources of the nation belong to the people. The consequences of their tenure in office will be to our collective detriment for years to come as investors shirk investment in Australia lest Labor return to the Treasury benches once again.

Watching the ruin they have created I therefore find listening to Gillard and her Treasurer really hard on the nerves. But with Australia’s worst Treasurer in living memory – a Jim Cairnes clone only worse – speaking of the Republican Party of the United States as “cranks and crazies”, it really does make you wonder just how obtuse some people are. And to add insult to injury, our interim Prime Minister has backed her Treasurer up by repeating the same again as if she were a font of political and economic wisdom so that throwing support behind her Treasurer adds any kind of weight at all to his puny and inane judgment.

Forget about the fact that in a few months there is at least a 50-50 chance that the American President will be a Republican. There is no doubt that a President Mitt Romney would just glide past such foolishness since what the Treasurer or Prime Minister of Australia think about him and his party is little more than dust on the balance given the weight of woes he would inherit. And it also doesn’t much matter since whatever may be the views of our Prime Minister and her Treasurer, their influence in Washington will be negligible so that whatever they say will make not a whit of difference one way or the other to what actually gets done.

People whose idea of a stimulus package consists of pink batts and school halls, who believe wasting billions on the National Broadband Network is equivalent to the Snowy Mountain, who think they are doing the nation any good at all by increasing the rate of taxation on the one strong industry we had, and who believe that a carbon tax is the key to our future prosperity, are the last people you would think would want to introduce the words “cranks and crazies” into public discourse.

Here in Australia the Government pretends that it has some kind of strategy for getting the budget back into surplus of which two things may be said. The first is that – although in its words alone and not be its actions – by making the commitments they have made Gillard and Swan have at least recognised getting the budget into surplus is actually something that ought to be done. If there are therefore any cranks and crazies around in the US, it is the people who have been complicit in allowing the level of debt to rise to $US16 trillion with not a strategy in sight to bring it back down or, indeed, even to reverse its upwards course. What do our PM and Treasurer think of an Obama administration that has not presented a budget to Congress in three years? For Republicans to try to get some kind of fiscal action out of a Democrat Senate is just what anyone with sense would want them to do. If there are cranks and crazies around in the US, they are almost entirely found on the Democrat side of the aisle.

But the second matter shown by our leadership team is to see just how badly these people have mangled the one economy that has been in their charge. Handed not just a deficit free economy but an economy entirely free of debt, handed on a plate a mining boom designed to feed into a Chinese boom, they have managed in just five years to create massive debt and are about to oversee this forecast fall in living standards which is anyway evident in the shrinking of the private sector at the present time.

From the start they have never had much idea about what should be done and what needs doing. They have followed the socialist path of least resistance, re-empowering unions, spending money they don’t have, and because they have mis-managed our finances, literally leaving Australia defenseless in an increasingly dangerous world. The surest sign we have just how shallow their judgments are is that they can unselfconsciously go about calling others the very names that most appropriately apply to themselves.