Fuligin Budget

In the lexicon of NZ political-journamalist cliché ^{[redundancy alert]}, the term 'Black Budget' will always refer to Nordmeyer's budget of 1958. Taxes were increased and breweries were pissed off, so conventional wisdom has it that this was a terrible misjudgement (apart from solving a major economic crisis) such as should never be repeated and should serve as a dire warning for always.

A new term will be needed for this week's budget, in which Finan Sminister Bill English will address the dire budgetary shortfall that no-one could possibly have anticipated when he cut taxes for higher-income earners last year.

There will be tax increases though no-one is calling them that. We have a special tax rebate targetted at non-wealthy parents with kids, the "Working for Families Scheme" [some clever-dick's idea of a clever title]... the rightwingers like to call this a 'hand-out' or 'an entitlement' so they can include it in the figures whenever they are making up bullshit about teh frighteningly high level of welfare dependency. They have repeated the same claim often enough that journalists have fallen into step with the description of WfF as a benefit rather than an absence of taxation. It is almost as if journalists are lazy and stupid.

Anyway, here's Pry Minister John Key foreshadowing cuts in the coming Budget to the WfF rebate, the "Kiwisaver" retirement scheme and the interest-free student-loan scheme:

We don’t want Kiwis to be thinking from year to year that these programmes could end up being axed.

We want to give them confidence that future governments can afford to run and maintain them.

As you have probably guessed by now, apart from Key and his proxies there is no-one else proposing to axe these programmes and no-one else eroding confidence that they can be maintained in the future.

It is never a good sign when a tory government promises 'restored confidence' or 'certainty' about something you had previously thought you possessed; it will the certainty of knowing it now belongs to someone else. But apparently New Zealanders like this sort of thing and want another three years of it since all the polls point to the re-election of these clowns later this year. I have no skin in this game since most of our money is invested elsewhere and here in Maison d'être we collect dual citizenships and passports the way other people collect stamps. Anyway, what sort of game is it where you're using human skin as a counter? That's just sick.