Family Petition

I have signed a petition. You may like to as well. Check it out.

House Hunt

I have been on and off house hunting lately. Everytime I get serious about it, dad tells me to wait a few more months. Anyway, tomorrow I am looking at a couple of houses. One is in Weymouth Road, right opposite the car wash place, and the other one is in Greenmeadows.

Manipulating Language - 'surplus' (from Maxim)

The word 'surplus' used to mean a genuine mistake by the Government in taking more tax than what it spent; 'what is not required for the purpose in hand'. Now it means a calculated scheme of money collection for redistribution in election year. Finance Minister Michael Cullen has been sitting on a $7.4 billion surplus, the biggest mountain of spare cash a New Zealand Government has seen (up from March last year when the figure was $3.4 billion). The Treasury said the record surplus arose because the accounts were running $1.5 billion ahead of forecasts in the first nine months of the financial year. Income from GST was up $225 million and investment income by Crown entities had swollen by $548 million.



The $7.4 billion surplus is a record both in dollars and as a proportion of GDP. For every $100 spent in the economy, $5.60 is spare cash for the Government to do with as it likes. Dr Cullen has boasted of his tight-fistedness in previous Budgets, but today he's delivered an old-fashioned spend-up, despite a refusal to lower tax rates.



What we're seeing is a Government creating all sorts of bureaucracies to distribute public monies, but it's only austere tax policies that enable it to create a 'surplus' and present its actions at budget time as 'compassionate'.