Krugman on "Marxism!"

Crazy Climate Economics - NYTimes.com

Was I sounding too Right wing in the last post?  Time for a corrective, then.

An excellent column yesterday by Paul Krugman on the craziness of the ideological rhetorical (much of) the American Right has adopted in the last decade.   A taste:

Everywhere you look these days, you see Marxism on the rise. Well, O.K., maybe you don’t — but conservatives do. If you so much as mention income inequality, you’ll be denounced as the second coming of Joseph Stalin; Rick Santorum has declared that any use of the word “class” is “Marxism talk.” In the right’s eyes, sinister motives lurk everywhere — for example, George Will says the only reason progressives favor trains is their goal of “diminishing
Americans’ individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism.”

Ha!  Didn't Atlas Shrugged indicate that a certain author who had a fetish about individualism thought trains were OK?  (Actually, at Slate, they looked at this question in detail a few years ago.  Libertarians apparently still like trains - as long as they are privately owned trains.)

Krugman predicts that the Right's reaction to Obama using the EPA to address CO2 (because they won't let him use market based methods) will again be to claim "Marxism":

You can already get a taste of what’s coming in the dissenting opinions from a recent Supreme Court ruling on power-plant pollution. A majority of the justices agreed that the E.P.A. has the right to regulate smog from coal-fired power plants, which drifts across state lines. But
Justice Scalia didn’t just dissent; he suggested that the E.P.A.’s proposed rule — which would tie the size of required smog reductions to cost — reflected the Marxist concept of “from each
according to his ability.” Taking cost into consideration is Marxist? Who knew?

As he goes on to argue, very reasonably:

Why is this crazy? Normally, conservatives extol the magic of markets and the adaptability of the private sector, which is supposedly able to transcend with ease any constraints posed by, say, limited supplies of natural resources. But as soon as anyone proposes adding a few limits to reflect environmental issues — such as a cap on carbon emissions — those all-capable corporations supposedly lose any ability to cope with change.

Now, the rules the E.P.A. is likely to impose won’t give the private sector as much flexibility as it would have had in dealing with an economywide carbon cap or emissions tax. But Republicans have only themselves to blame: Their scorched-earth opposition to any kind of climate policy has left executive action by the White House as the only route forward.

The Right in the US has (in large part) become an intellectual embarrassment, and we are all waiting for the recovery.
 

Islam as a disastrous religion

Looking back over the last few decades, I guess you could say that modern concerns with Islam and its interaction with the West really kicked off with Iran, both with the 1979 hostage crisis, but more particularly (because of its actual outreach into the West itself),  the 1989 Salman Rushdie fatwa. (A good 25 year anniversary article is here.)

Then of course you get 9-11, and everyone worried about radical Islam.   As for me, I read some of the more right wing anti-Islamic blogs, but (as with Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs) it became clear that some of the push back was becoming far too Tea Party right wing nutty and racist, and a less hyperbolic approach to the issue was appropriate.  I even read one of Karen Armstrong's books on the religion, and it did (even though I was aware of her excuse making tendencies) make me more sympathetic to the idea that Islam did not have to be viewed as always being nutty and reactionary, and in fact originally had a social philosophy which was (in today's terms) progressive.

But come to the present day, and man, is Islam having a massive PR crisis again, or what?

I mean, where ever you look now, its influence just seems to be disastrous, and if it's not the centuries old branches having it out with massive death and destruction on the battlefield (Syria) or streets (Iraq, Egypt), it's the influence it has on maintaining a positively anti-modernist system of education and social structures.

On Syria, a conflict about which I have not exactly been bothering to understand in detail, Reuters had an article last week on the influence of the apocalyptic prophecies in attracting combatants:

The power of those prophecies for many fighters on the ground means that the three-year-old conflict is more deeply rooted - and far tougher to resolve - than a simple power struggle between President Bashar al-Assad and his rebel foes.

Syria's war has killed more than 140,000 people, driven millions from their homes and left many more dependent on aid. Diplomatic efforts, focused on the political rather than religious factors driving the conflict, have made no headway.

"If you think all these mujahideen came from across the world to fight Assad, you're mistaken," said a Sunni Muslim jihadi who uses the name Abu Omar and fights in one of the many anti-Assad Islamist brigades in Aleppo.

"They are all here as promised by the Prophet. This is the war he promised - it is the Grand Battle," he told Reuters, using a word which can also be translated as slaughter.

On the other side, many Shi'ites from Lebanon, Iraq and Iran are drawn to the war because they believe it paves the way for the return of Imam Mahdi - a descendent of the Prophet who vanished 1,000 years ago and who will re-emerge at a time of war to establish global Islamic rule before the end of the world.

Well that's great.  Some people used to worry about fundamentalist Christian "End Times" views leading an American President into some Middle East nuclear war scenario, but fortunately, the American system always seems to work as a filter so that we only end up with Presidents who have a faith that is strongly kept in control by pragmatism.  (The extent to which they are genuinely, deeply religious, rather than doing it for show, is always a matter of speculation as well.)   

But in Islam, you really do have apocalyptic views directly involved in war and mayhem.

What's more, the anti modernism streak in Islam just makes for some really rotten countries.   As I noted last week, Afghanistan looks completely hopeless, with a primarily rural based population that barely gets educated and whose only concession to modernity seems to be in wanting modern weapons.  (And the freedom to export drug addiction around the world as a way of making a living.)  Saudi Arabia still executes people for using black magic.  Here's a 2013 article in The Atlantic about that country's "war on witchcraft".
That country's list of scientific innovations - despite having squillons of dollars that could be put into science - seems limited to intensive studies of what camel's milk (and urine!)  is good for, yet it turns out that camels are probably spreading the deadly MERS virus.

And as for sexual politics - well, apart from the general plight of women, last night's Four Corners looked at the extensive problem of male child sexual abuse in Pakistan.    Not only that, but I liked [/sarc] the irony of how many homeless kids are also addicted to heroin from the Taliban in the country next door.

And then, of course, you have Nigeria and the kidnapping of girls, but apparently that is just part of their plan for creating an Islamic State.

And while one might think that modern communications means that there should be a natural tide towards vaguely modern ideas of how communities can successfully live - Sharia law is coming to Brunei, and strengthening in those parts of Indonesia where it is allowed. 

So, as I say, it is extremely difficult to find positive things to say about Islam at the moment.   Sure, Christianity has its centuries of conflict, witch burning, attempted social control and sexual abuse to point the finger at as well, but any social problems it causes have (by and large - still tidying up going on in the sex abuse and homosexuality side) been sorted. 

The thing that's depressing about Islam is that you can't really see how it is going to improve.  I guess a resolution to Israel/Palestine matter would help - and Israel's present leadership is not helping there - but at a more fundamental level and long term scale, Islamist TV still telling its kids (as it has for years) that its good to shoot the Jews is actually the bigger problem.

The only good thing you can really say (and, in a way, the only grounds on which to still not too deeply regret the way the West got into the Iraq and Afghani wars) from "our" point of view is that while ever Islam is fighting itself, it's not concentrating on fighting the West.  Yet, I want to feel better about the world as a whole - to see progress towards peace everywhere and better and fairer societies.

So, someone who can tell me why I should revert to a more optimistic view for how Islam will improve, please let me know.

Bernard's on the money

Bernard Keane is a bit of an odd fish, but sometimes he seems right on the money.  His column yesterday is just excellent, and here are some extracts:

...this dissonance between what the Coalition said in opposition and what it now says isn’t merely about being mugged by reality, or even about breaking promises. The weekend’s silliness about freezing MPs’ pay, announced triumphantly in a drop to News Corp papers, was highly symbolic. The Rudd government had done precisely the same thing — but who should have railed against that but Tony Abbott himself, who labelled it a “populist stunt” while, apparently, living hand-to-mouth on his post-2007 salary. It demonstrated how, on virtually any issue, from climate change to paid parental leave to the economy to taxation to political consistency itself, it is straightforward to find a quote in which Tony Abbott has declared, hand on heart, entirely the opposite to his current position.

And:

“I’m not playing word games,” Hockey averred, hilariously, to Laurie Oakes during one such discussion. Indeed, it’s less like playing word games and more like waterboarding the English language. It’s beyond casuistry; it makes John Howard’s legendary parsing of his own statements look epistemologically rigorous.

 And this, which is, I think, a fair summary of the state of modern politics:

Some, like John Quiggin, argue that a lack of interest in facts is increasingly a characteristic of the Right — that it’s in the Liberals’ DNA, so to speak — which overlooks that relativism has been a defining characteristic of much of the scholarship from the cultural Left from the 1970s onward and is still to be found adorning identity politics. It is true, however, that progressive parties like Labor, especially, in Australia, and the Democrats in the US, have struggled to find a way to counter how politicians of the Right have freed themselves from the shackles of consistency and evidence. But for now, the most sound analytical approach is to ignore what the Coalition says and focus entirely on who benefits from its use of power. That will provide the most basic test of its first budget.

Talk about your interruptions to the in flight movie

A curious story appears in today's article in the Fairfax press about how Pope Francis has been emphasising the reality of the Devil:

During the conference, the Reverend Cesar Truqui, an exorcist now based in Switzerland, recounted one experience he had aboard a Swissair flight. "Two lesbians," he said, had sat behind him on the plane. Soon afterward, he said, he felt Satan's presence. As he silently sought to repel the evil spirit through prayer, one of the women, he said, began growling demonically and threw chocolates at his head.

Asked how he knew the woman was possessed, he said that "once you hear a Satanic growl, you never forget it. It's like smelling Margherita pizza for the first time. It's something you never forget."

Mostly rubbish

Jason Soon on twitter points with some approval to a column by the "hey, we only win by pretending we're the Liberal Party party" Senator elect David Leyhonhjelm.

Yet what's the first sign this is a column by an ideological goose?  This:

It is noticeable that advocates for big government are only Keynesians on the way down (when recession equals budget deficit) but they refuse to follow their own rules and advocate a budget surplus when growth rates have recovered. Economic growth has followed long term trend for the last few years so by any standard (Keynesian, Classical, Austrian) we should not now have a budget deficit.

That is flagrantly dishonest if he is suggesting (and I reckon he is) that Labor was not seeking to return to surplus.  The problem with getting there as promised was some out of kilter forecasts of Treasury; not the view that returning to surplus did not matter.

And then we go into the details:

the LDP proposed budget provides a modest drop in tax revenue along with nearly $40 billion in spending cuts, so that the 2014-15 budget moves from a $33.9 billion deficit to a predicted $3.1 billion surplus. It can be done, and it should be done.

Yeah, sure.  Government spending can be turned off like a tap and it's "hey, no big deal" only if you come from an ideological commitment that government always should be tiny.

But look at some of the things included in the table in the article as to where the savings are coming from:

$5 billion in savings from including the family home in the pension assets test!

That is ludicrous - to suggest that such a change could be implemented in one hit.  Just how many houses owned by pensioners does he want to see hit the market in an immediate effort to downsize?   Where does he think all the people who need to do this are going to move?  I don't see the capital cities having a hell of lot of $200,000 properties for sale, last time I looked.  Reverse mortgages?   Yeah, the LDP hates governments taking people's money in taxes - they would prefer they lose it instead on interest to the banks to be able to keep buying bread.  (And note - I am not suggesting that there is no scope for some adjustment of current pension policy on this - what I am objecting to is the ridiculous suggestion that you can do it and raise $5 billion immediately without dire disruption.) 

And then there's the immediate $5 billion dollar reduction to the higher education subsidy.  Yeah, sure, no disruption to the system there...

And there is a lot more, including some ideological driven points on taxes and how they are bad, bad, bad, but I can't go on right now - I got to do some other things.

It's clear enough, though, that the LDP "budget" is pure fantasy land.

Jason - stop getting into the boxing ring.  It's knocking some of the common sense out of you.

Update:  I am amused by monty's savage takedown of the bald one's "budget", too.

So that's why we're getting more road spending

Tony Abbott's grand infrastructure plan may be an expensive road to nowhere | World news | theguardian.com

Lenore Taylor casts a (justifiably) jaundiced eye over why the Abbott government is talking up road building, whether or not anyone has worked out if it is worth it.

It comes down to this, does it?:

Abbott is convinced of the voter, as well as economic, appeal of road
funding. He wrote in his book, Battlelines, that even the "humblest
person is king in his own car."

Uhuh.

About an animation studio

DreamWorks Animation at 20 - Los Angeles Times

This article takes the usual LA Times industry insider look at how Dreamworks operates, and there were a couple of things of particular interest:

DreamWorks is also making strides overseas, with much of the focus on China, where
the "Kung Fu Panda" films have been very popular. Katzenberg has been at the forefront of Hollywood's push into China, visiting the country once a month for the last two years.

The studio is working with local partners to build an entertainment and cultural district in
Shanghai called DreamCenter. The center, set to open in 2017, will include a 500-seat Imax cinema, multiple performance venues and Broadway style-theaters. The area also will house Oriental DreamWorks, an animation studio that currently has 200 employees and will hire 150 more by the end of this year to work on various film and TV projects,
including "Kung Fu Panda 3."

"China in three or four years will be the No. 1 movie market in the world,"
Katzenberg said. " I just look at it as a place of opportunity."

Gee.  I would not have been sure at all that Kung Fu Panda would have worked in China.   But there you go.

DreamWorks also is one of those companies where the benefits are good:

The studio's perks include a full-time doctor's office, free meals, game rooms and a college-campus-style environment with waterfalls and koi ponds.

There are yoga and sculpture classes, and an art show that enables employees to express themselves freely in ways not permitted in their everyday work. A profit-sharing plan pays bonuses to employees based on the studio's financial performance.

Such benefits have made DreamWorks a regular on Fortune magazine's annual list of 100 best employers. Last year it was the only Hollywood studio to make the list,
ranking 12th.

I think the studio has put out some fine films over the years, so I hope it does continue to exist for a long time yet.

John Oliver reads a letter

John Oliver was always one of the funniest parts of Jon Stewart's show, and I see that quite a few official clips from his own show are being put on Youtube.   The writing is clearly in the same style as that for The Daily Show, but that's not a problem.  Here is one of the less sweary clips I could find, as I still have standards as to what you can hear from this blog, you know:

Things that please me

*  Firefox has been updated to 29.0.1, and I find the new look very attractive.  Not a huge change, I guess, but pleasing none the less.  There's something about new tab pages carrying ads, though, which I don't quite follow.  Guess I will have to wait and see.  Firefox has been my preferred browsers for more years than I can remember.  It's the vast library of add ons that make it great, I reckon.

* I just watched The World This Week, a summary of reports by the ABC on international issues (from their international correspondents) over the last week.  It's great, and makes the effort privately owned media puts into TV journalism on international issues look truly pathetic.  (Of course, I have often praised the ABC's Foreign Correspondent too.)  Can anyone explain why you seem to need a national broadcaster in order to do really good, informative reporting on international issues?

* I think Melbourne and Adelaide have long had small local smallgoods manufacturing that meant that good, fermented style smallgoods (like salamis, etc) in a wide range similar to what you may get in Europe were always available.  Local manufacturing of these in Brisbane has (it seems to me) finally taken off in the last 10 to 20 years, and we now can get a similar range of products, but you still tend to have to seek them out, often at the weekend farmer's markets.  (The somewhat slow moving redevelopment of the Brisbane showgrounds is supposed to include a permanent farmer's market - something that is sorely missed in this city.)   For the moment, Adam's Continental Smallgoods in Brisbane's west is pretty good, and sells an extensive range of meats too, but it is a bit far to go for people on the other side of the city. 

On Saturday we went to the Kelvin Grove Saturday farmers' market again.  We hadn't been for a while, but it is always good for cheap (and a big range of) fruit and veges, and some specialty meats and snacks.  It has one permanent smallgoods vendor, and we tried their chorizo and (what was called) a French style salami-ish sausage.  Both were very good.  The company's name is Backa Gourmet Foods.  They seem to be based in Beenleigh and just sell in Queensland local markets.  This is pleasing.

An unpleasant parasite, and HIV in Africa

A Simple Theory, and a Proposal, on H.I.V. in Africa - NYTimes.com

Call me a big wuss, if you want, but the number of nasty parasites that lurk in the middle of Africa makes me rather disinterested in visiting at least that part of the continent.  (That and a sense of over-familiarity inspired by decades of David Attenborough, I think.)    

Gerard and the rack

My oh my, Gerard Henderson has become a tedious and silly bore. 

After his extraordinary performance on Lateline, where he attacked ICAC because of his deep resentment that detailed denials make under oath to it (and to the media) by a politician could lead to a resignation,  he's writing yesterday that the ABC has to know that they are not getting balanced audiences to Q&A:

As MWD has explained on numerous occasions, the political allegiance of the audience which Q&A depicts at the beginning of each program is wilfully misleading. See MWD passim, ad nauseam.

As MWD has documented, political identification is by way of self-identification. Since Q&A is filmed in the ABC’s inner-city studio in Sydney’s Ultimo, it tends to be stacked by members of the Green Left who hang out nearby and from the neighbouring University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) and the University of Sydney.

So the best way for a follower of Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky to obtain admission to Q&A is to take off his/her sandals and Che Guevara tee-shirt, put on sensible shoes and a shirt – and present themselves as Tony Abbott supporters. Then it’s “Welcome” in order to seemingly make up a representative audience.

How, pray tell, does Gerard propose the ABC ensure that entrants to the audience are not lying about their political allegiance?  Install a torture rack at the entrance?  Throw them in a pond and see if the float or sink?    

Here, let's give Gerard something to stop whining about and put him in charge of selecting studio audience and see how his hit rate goes.   I can just imagine him sitting po faced while each audience member appears, and he gives a thumbs up or down, perhaps depending on the hair length of the males, and whether he can sniff out patchouli on a female.   When he fails to get a Coalition quota, it'll be "This won't do, Mark. I'm ordering a bus for a pickup of white men over 50 from the Penrith RSL.  That'll fix it."

A trend missed

I noticed this on an episode or two of the "home restaurants" on My Kitchen Rules - diners drinking something out of what looked like a jar, with straws.   Here is it on Fairfax this morning. 


What is this about?  By coincidence, I did see "mason jars" on sale at some nick nack sort of outlet shop, and that's what they appear to be.

And yes, Googling, I see that people have been asking for nearly a year now:  why are people drinking out of mason jars.   (And that is almost certainly the only time I will be posting a link to a site called Lipstick Alley.)

Elsewhere, the question has been more specific:  why do hipsters like to drink things out of mason jars.

It seems there is no satisfactory explanation, and it is, in my opinion, the silliest trend for quite a few years.

Watchable zombies

I'm not a fan of the zombie genre in movies, due to their routine gruesomeness.   In gaming, so far as I can tell from previews I have seen on TV, I object to their use as a "legitimate" target for headshots and bloodletting on an enormous scale.   That said, I did get the DayZ mod for my son on the basis that it looked like it was not too gruesome in its graphics, and besides,  the point of the game was mostly to simply sneak around and avoid getting chased by zombies.   (On most servers, you had to spend a fair bit of time simply trying to find weapons before you could risk being spotted by a zombie.)   The best thing about it was the empty creepiness, and enjoyed playing some sessions with my son.  Now that it is being developed into a proper stand alone game, it looks like it is being made more gruesome.  Annoying.

This is all by way of background to explaining that I was not at all sure about my son seeing World War Z last year.  (I am, it seems at times, about the only father in Australia who actually takes care as to the level of violence in movies or games a son is being exposed to.)

But he's turned 14, and I took a punt and bought the DVD and we watched it last night.

It is surprisingly good.

As with all zombie movies, it has a silly premise (10 seconds for a virus or whatever it is to zombie-fy a bitten person?  come on..) but the best thing about it is that it is probably the least gruesomely violent zombie movie ever made.

It is, in many respects, a lot like the old DayZ - a zombie experience that is more defined by the creepiness, the chase, and the sudden surprise, rather than being a gore-fest.  Of course there is shooting and bodies hurling all over the place, but virtually no blood.  A lot of significant violence acts are not directly shown on screen at all.

The end sequence also features perhaps the best zombie acting I have ever seen.

Brad Pitt is fine, and he also was one of the producers.   I assume he has to be given credit for deciding that a zombie movie could be good without the gore.

Given that I liked him in The Tree of Life recently too, I am having to reconsider his contribution to movies.

A technical argument

Why the Official Explanation of MH370’s Demise Doesn’t Hold Up - Ari N. Schulman - The Atlantic


This long, technical and somewhat skeptical look at the analysis done to work out the likely flight path of MH370 doesn't seem to answer one question:  what were the apparent black box pings from underwater if they weren't from a black box?

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.