Giving credit (and will slap myself in the face later)

Good Lord!   I find myself having to endorse a post by Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy for once.

The story this morning run hard by News Corp (in fact they commissioned the new "research") struck me as an immediate furphy, and just all part of Rupert's minions' active role in softening up the electorate for a "it's the welfare cuts we had to have" spin that the Abbott government so dearly needs in pushing  for this budget. 

Awkward, but nice

This was an awkward photo, featuring my favourite Hollywood identity, ever*:

But all in a good cause:

Academy Award-winning filmmaker and philanthropist Steven Spielberg presented President Barack Obama with the USC Shoah Foundation's Ambassador for Humanity Award at a glittering Beverly Hills gala that included guests Barbra Streisand, Samuel L. Jackson and Kim Kardashian.

Kim Kardashian?  Let's roll our eyes and move on - 

Wednesday's evening event, which was hosted by Conan O’Brien and featured a performance by Bruce Springsteen, marked the 20th anniversary for the foundation that Spielberg founded after making Schindler’s List, for which he was honored with a best director Oscar.

Initially conceived as a repository for the oral and filmed personal histories of Shoah survivors, the center's archives have come to house nearly 52,000 first-person histories in 58 countries -- not only of Jewish Holocaust survivors but of gays, Jehovah's Witnesses and Roma persecuted by the Nazis.

And according to the Hollywood Reporter, Obama did well:

In arguably one of the most powerful speeches of his presidency on Israel and genocide, Obama then told the crowd that because of Schindler's List "we were reminded that the Holocaust was not a matter of distant history. The voices, the memories of survivors became a part of us. It entered into our DNA. That's what stories do. That's what Steven does. That's what Bruce (Springsteen) does. They tell a story that stitches up our fates with the fates of theirs. That film gave us a stake in that history and a stake in insuring autocracies like that don't happen again.

"Now, if the story had ended there, it would have been enough. But Steven didn’t stop with Schindler’s List, because there were too many other stories to tell. So he created this foundation to undertake what he called 'a rescue mission' -- preserving the memories that would otherwise be lost to time," he explained.

Let's end with a joke from Conan O'Brien:

From their seats at the head table, the president, Spielberg and Bruce Springsteen were regaled by the night’s host, comedian Conan O’Brien, who joked that the foundation  had been “recording evidence of intolerance long before Donald Sterling’s girlfriend.”

And if I want to play a game of "my favourite director blows your crass favourite director out of the water with important cultural and humanitarian works" with anyone who likes Quentin Tarantino or Clint Eastwood, I see there is a website devoted to listing what charities celebrities support.  (Yeah, so sorry, I think Spielberg wins easily.)

* and Steven Spielberg.   (Ha - a joke)

Eastern Europe - still a worry

In parts of Europe, the far right rises again

Last month, I traveled to Hungary and Greece, where the neo-fascist movements are strongest. In Hungary, the extreme-right Jobbik party won 1 in 5 votes in last month's parliamentary election. In Greece, even as the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party is being prosecuted by the government as a criminal organization, it remains the fourth-largest political party in the country. Golden Dawn lawmaker Ilias Kasidiaris, who sports a
swastika tattoo and once read from "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" on the floor of Parliament, is running for mayor of Athens.

Both parties deny being inherently anti-Semitic or anti-Roma, but their
symbols and rhetoric suggest otherwise. Party leaders are unapologetically hostile to LGBT rights, and Golden Dawn is vehemently anti-immigrant. And in both Greece and Hungary, many voters appear to be either overlooking the neo-fascist message or embracing it.

Not even popular in the business world?

Back in the second half of 2013, just after the Abbott Government took office, almost 70 per cent of company directors expected the new administration to have a positive impact on their business decision making. 

In the latest Australian Institute of Company Directors (AICD) survey, this figure has slumped to just 30 per cent.

This loss of confidence has also translated into a fall in the proportion of directors who believe the Federal Government understands business - from 55 per cent last year to 48 per cent now.

Onya, Tone.

No emergency, cont..

Koukoulas has been pushing hard his take that by putting only mildly more optimistic figures into forecasts you get a budget surplus within a few years without any massive mucking about that Abbott is planning.

He may be right, but this is his other point that Labor would be wise to push hard:

What most if not all commentators have missed in addition to the rubbish forecasts underpinning the MYEFO and Commission of Audit snake oil, is that the cuts in spending and hikes in taxes are largely to cover the pet projects of the Coalition and not reduce the deficit.

Getting rid of the mining tax and carbon price, the paid parental leave scheme and increasing defence spending to 2 per cent of GDP are costing the budget bottom line at least $10 billion a year and this is growing into the years of the forward estimates.

Abandoning this set of priorities and using realistic forecasts for the economy would all of the sudden not only see large budget surplus in place, but would mean net government debt is eliminated by about 2020. The deficit 'crisis' is of the Coalition's making.

Here is the emergency and it is in half baked policy priorities and dodgy economic parameters.

A tale of budgetary misunderstandings

I said to a couple of people at my office this morning, putting the argument I posted this morning, "if the petrol prices go up because of the budget to any significant extent, that will go over like a lead balloon regardless of richer people also having a tax increase."

No, I was assured:  the only budget thing about fuel is to with the diesel fuel rebate, which would only affect miners and farmers.  There is no petrol fuel excise.

Not keeping up with such matters very closely myself, I had to double check and was able to confirm that, indeed, there is a 38c per litre petrol excise, and rumours are around that it will indeed change in the budget.  (In all likelihood, to try to make up for lost money from raising the threshold on the "deficit levy" to something well over $100,000.)

So there you go - it would seem some people have forgotten that there is a petrol excise at all, given that it hasn't changed since Howard decided not to index it back in 2001.

But this matter has raised one other issue I don't understand.

The diesel fuel rebate is argued as justified because of the principle that you shouldn't tax an input cost to a business.   But what about petrol using business and their input?

I see the other argument is that it is for diesel used for off road purposes,  and as the excise was at least nominally is to pay for road construction and maintenance for those who use roads, this is another reason to exempt heavy off road users from it. 

That has a certain logic about it, but as this detailed look at the matter that appeared in the Australian Conservation Foundation notes, it can have perverse results from an energy use point of view, such as miners deciding to use trucks to move mountains of dirt instead of conveyor belts.  Also, it seems that the money raised by road users paying excises far exceeds what the Commonwealth returns in road spending.   If that's right, it is one class of fuel users who pay what has become something like a general tax, versus another (gigantic) class of fuel users who don't.

Changes to the scheme, the article argues, are affordable by Australian mining companies. 

It seems to me that, giving the miners were able to con the Labor government into a mining tax scheme that minimised the cost to them, a re-jig of the diesel tax rebate as it applies to them that brings in a lazy billion or so should be quite do-able. 

What a country

BBC News - Malaysian politician's video leads to sedition charge

Keep up the good work, Niki

Niki Savva is keeping up the leaks on how Peta Credlin is unpopular with many in the government.  She (Savva) also makes the PM's office sound remarkably like the protective circle that existed around the Rudd Prime Ministership, version 1:

Another story confirming why I'd rather not live in the US

Montana killing: Deadly clash of teenage mischief, pot, and self-defense? - CSMonitor.com

Early signs of a one term PM, if not government

OK, OK, it is (to be honest) way too early to making any call on the fate of the Abbott government at the next election (there is, for one thing, the completely unpredictable role mad Clive Palmer and his Senators may play in what can be done with the budget anyway), but apart from the general appallingly ham fisted way he has handled the kite flying exercise of possible budget measures, there are a couple of things which I expect really would kill Abbott's prospects:

a.  any significant increase in fuel excise will be wildly unpopular with the middle class, and the argument that the "rich" are also contributing by facing a tax levy will not work if it kicks in at too high a level (say $150,000).

b.  Christopher Pyne's sudden enthusiasm for deregulating university fees, if enacted, will guarantee no one under 35 will vote the Coalition for the next decade.   A fair few parents of high school students will also be upset, if not parents of those already at university.

The Abbott program never made sense - that his revenue measures (no new taxes except for the one needed for his parental leave plan which is only supported by a handful of voters; giving up revenue from the carbon "tax" and mining tax) and his savings measures (to come from spending cuts, but won't cut pensions, defence - in fact will increase defence spending, Gonski or disability spending, and will deal with carbon dioxide by spending rather than collecting money) would succeed in a budget surplus.

It is only now that voters are realising it.

The tragedy is that the internal Labor war over its disastrous appointment of Kevin Rudd into the leadership (back in 2007, I mean) prevented it from being able to sell the message.

PS:   I think Mumbles is probably right when he says this:

Latest reports suggest the “deficit levy” will cut in at salaries over $100 thousand a year, perhaps as high as $150 thousand. Anyone who believes this will infuriate most Australians, either because they instinctively loathe taxes or because they are shocked at the broken promise, needs to get out from behind their desk a bit more.

Mosey out of the think tank, take a walk in the park.

In other words, the government can probably successfully argue for it on equity grounds, at least if it were being argued in isolation.  (And Labor has to be careful here that they do not appear to be defending the rich when they oppose it.)

What I think Mumbles is overlooking is that it is not in isolation;  it has to be sold in the context of how much pain is coming to the middle income earners.   If they are hit too hard, they will not care much that a group of people who can afford a tax levy are also paying more.  And the higher you set the cut off for it, the less relevant it becomes on equity grounds, from a middle class point of view.

This is where Labor will need to be careful with its messaging - it needs to make it clear that they are opposing the Budget approach looking at it as a whole. 

More intense rains noted, again

Climate Change Study Finds U.S. Is Already Widely Affected - NYTimes.com

I see from this US report that changes in rainfall intensity seem to be already clear in parts of the US:

One of the report’s most striking findings concerned the rising frequency
of torrential rains. Scientists have expected this effect for decades
because more water is evaporating from a warming ocean surface, and the
warmer atmosphere can hold the excess vapor, which then falls as rain or
snow. But even the leading experts have been surprised by the extent of
the changes.

The report found that the eastern half of the country is receiving more
precipitation in general. And over the past half-century, the proportion
of precipitation that is falling in very heavy rain events has jumped
by 71 percent in the Northeast, by 37 percent in the Midwest and by 27
percent in the Southeast, the report found.

“It’s a big change,” said Radley M. Horton, a climate scientist at Columbia
University who helped write the report. He added that scientists do not
fully understand the regional variations.

In recent years, sudden, intense rains have caused extensive damage.

Not quite as bad as it sounds

'Exploding head syndrome'—a real but overlooked sleep disorder

A very, very hopeless place

If you missed it, and want to feel deeply pessimistic about Afghanistan, watch last night's Foreign Correspondent.  

It remains, as it seems to have always been, an awful, hopeless country.

How I have come to view economists, by reference to the cultural greats....

PS:  if anyone thinks I am being unfair, this is Curly on TV last night:

Politicians, who are the people who got us into this budget problem in the first place, should have the kind of incentives to get us out of this problem.

And, for example, you could have a rule whereby while the budget is in deficit that their salaries get cut by 50 per cent and they remain at that level until the budget is back into surplus.

I might go along with it if it was also the rule that economics professors who warn that stagflation is a real and present danger take a 50% drop in income (til it does arrive) if it hasn't yet arrived within 3 years of the warning.

Interdimensional tales

The tales are not particularly "creepy", but they are new and somewhat interesting, if one has an interest in science fiction ideas for stories.

It does make me think that the genre of interdimensional travel has been little explored in science fiction movies.  (It has had a much better run in books.) 

Sure, time travel has been done to death, and sometimes that has a "many worlds element", but just straightforward stories of movement between parallel worlds - can't think of many.  Possible exception - sorta - Source Code (which I liked), but it only becomes clearly an element towards the end.  The only other one coming to mind is, of course, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, but it was not a major element, if I recall correctly.  

(Oh - I should say that I was pleased that Indian Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull - about the most unduly over-derided movie of the last decade - had aliens as interdimensional travellers, as that is pretty much the preferred way that Fortean types like to think of UFO's now.   Spielberg had updated his view of UFOs appropriately.)

The proposition: glass being half empty means it is not half full

I see that Sinclair Davidson has been graphing again, this time showing Commonwealth spending and revenue as a percentage of GDP.

I would have thought most people looking at the graph would say that it shows revenue and spending over the last 40 years bounces around between a pretty narrow range of about 22 to 27%.  Periods under both Labor and Liberal governments have seen revenues below spending, and spending below revenues (when measured this way).

The period post the GFC, shows the government spending increasing, and the dramatic drop below the decade of high revenue enjoyed by the Howard government.   It seems a pretty fair guess that if Rudd did not make the GFC stimulus spending (as widely supported by most economists and supported up to a point by the Coalition), and if Howard era revenues had continued (or even decreased more moderately) there would have not have been any budgetary problem at all.

Yet Davidson insists that the only way to interpret this is that spending is the problem.   His attitude seems to be "no, if I say a glass is half empty, it is impossible to assert that it is half full."   The large drop in revenue to far below a decade long average is supposed to be something to be ignored, presumably.  

He also gives the impression that he thinks turning government spending on or off is a simple thing, like turning on or off a tap - ignoring that people and companies make plans around government spending programs, and suffer disruption if they are too abruptly changed.  It further seems a feature of Right wing criticisms of Labor that they (and Treasury) are supposed to foresee sudden international financial crises and have a good idea of how much they may abruptly affect revenue.

On a related matter, Koukoulus has been running an interesting argument that if you add both government spending and revenue, it gives you a reasonable metric by which to judge "size of government":

one way is to look at the sum of Commonwealth revenue and spending as a share of GDP. This means that the more the government raises in tax and then recycles into the economy via spending, the bigger the footprint of government on the economy, and vice versa.

Makes sense?

A quick look at the size of government, on this measure, reveals some startling facts. I repeat facts based on data in Mr Hockey's Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook document.

Under the Rudd and Gillard governments, the average size of government was 47.4% of GDP.

The Howard government size of government was 49.2% of GDP.

Seems a not unreasonable way of looking at it.

But let's face it, if your libertarian inspired ideological approach is that government should be small, and increased taxes are always bad, and that Keynesian policies are mistaken, you're never going to have anything much new to say about Australian government policy other than "spending is the problem."

Update:  I see that Greg Jericho tweeted today a graph that shows in a clearer way the drop in revenue:
 

All the more to show the ludicrousness of insisting that spending is the only problem. 

Now they decide it's a bad idea

What do you know - there are two men with experience in the field who now have some regrets about where the "anything goes" approach to modern reproduction leads us:

Exhibit A:  not so well known actor Jason Patric, who is having a court brawl (and waging a PR campaign) regarding his rights to have a relationship with his biological son.  Yeah, he was happy enough to give a long term on again, off again girlfriend a sperm donation (delivered via artificial insemination, though - really, why did they bother with that if they had been long term lovers before - oh that's right, that would be too much like how babies are made by nature) and all was well for the first couple of years when he did see his son.  Then they stopped being friends and he was told to shove off.   It seems the laws designed to stop genuine anonymous sperm donors from interfering with parental "rights" are being used against Mr Patric.   This probably seems unfair to most people - when what they should be objecting to is people making babies in such a manner way in the first place.

Exhibit B:  reproductive technology cheer leader Robert Winston now is having misgivings about rich people soon making "designer babies".   What, he's only got around to watching Gattaca now?  Bit slow on the uptake, you "lesbians using reproductive technology is fine because they'll probably make fantastic mothers" claiming populariser of making babies in a way none at all would have existed before.

I didn't know that Cardwell grows nuts

So I'm being disparaging of people who claim UFO encounters, and who had a meeting up in Cardwell, North Queensland, last weekend.

But honestly, when you read their stories and look at the photos, I'm not convinced there will be a second Cardwell UFO Festival any time soon.

Space bugs

Space Station research shows that hardy little space travelers could colonize Mars

They've been exposing various microscopic lifeforms to the space environment at the ISS for some time now, and yes, some bugs have survived and are obviously very hard to kill.

I was wondering yesterday, on a related topic, as I made my first batch of "no knead" bread, about how much research has gone into the possibility that space radiation may make a normally mild natured (so to speak) microscopic lifeform into one that was dangerous.   As I was dealing with yeast, which is pretty much wandering all about the place all the time, that was the microscopic life that I was thinking about in particular.

Remember the story about the Texan man who by some fluke had a permanent colony of yeast in his gut that was brewing alcohol inside of him?   Well, you would hope that no future Moon or Mars colony ended up with at souped up yeast version which could take up home in everyone's gut and prove very difficult to remove.   It would be a particularly ignoble way for a colony to collapse (pretty much from unintentional alcoholic poisoning), wouldn't it?

OK, so maybe it's not a big enough premise for a science fiction blockbuster, but a short story at least...

Commission of Audit examined

What a great knock down of several of the Commission of Audit's key proposals by Greg Jericho.   His final paragraphs I would count as "tough but fair":

It would be nice to think this dopey regurgitation of libertarian masturbatory fantasy will be put to one side.

In the past, sensible heads would have prevailed. Many of the recommendations are similar to those in the 1996 commission of audit. A report John Howard largely ignored, and yet bizarrely Australia was able to continue to grow for another 18 years straight. But this government is too full of those who actually believe in this idiotic ideological view of the world – where “reform” is a synonym for “cut”, and ideology trumps evidence. And for them, the budget is just a first step to achieving it.