What is it like back home

[Jovial Monk]

So changing the subject? You concede the structural budget deficit?

[IQSRLOW]

Nope. How can I concede something that doesn't exist?

[Jovial Monk]

So, education obviously stopped before Grade 7.

[IQSRLOW]

Then I completed 7 more than you were able to

[Jovial Monk]

China's appetite back in healthy form
JOHN GARNAUT, BEIJING
January 8, 2010

AUSTRALIAN resource exporters are struggling to keep up with surging Chinese demand, pushing prices to highs not seen since before the financial crisis.

Spot iron ore prices in China have more than doubled since the lows of March and surged 24 per cent in a month, triggering sharp revisions to contract price forecasts.

Thermal and coking coal prices have also risen sharply on the back of Chinese demand, while a renewed Chinese Government campaign to close small mines looks set to open up opportunities for Australian exporters.

http://www.theage.com.au/business/china ... -lwvc.html

So, a second resources boom starting. Hopefully Labor govt, over the next couple of decades will spend the revenue from this boom more wisely than Howard/Costello did.

[IQSRLOW]

So you admit there was no boom?

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/busines ... 5771260637

More evidence that there was no structural budget deficit...it was concocted. Just like all of your lies

"I had never seen anything like it before," Costello says, suggesting Treasury had not shown him such evidence at the time that his budget had supposedly slipped into structural deficit. "It is extraordinary that the government went to the lengths it did, which included concocting a new measure of structural balance to try to show that there was a deficit in the last years of the Coalition government."

So the former treasurer was keenly interested in the Treasury's answer to a question on notice from a member of the Senate economics committee.Liberal Senator David Bushby asked Treasury to estimate the budget's structural position back to 1975 rather than just to 2001, as in the latest budget papers.

Treasury has now replied that "significant structural changes in the economy over the past quarter century" meant it would be inappropriate to stretch its methodology back to the 1970s. Instead, it presented structural balance estimates going back to 1971 from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and to the 1980s from the International Monetary Fund. As Costello points out, these OECD and IMF estimates suggest that the budget remained in structural surplus until the end of the former Coalition government. Treasury used to show him such numbers, he says.

"In fact, the only occasion in 40 years when a government managed to produce a structural surplus was between 1998 and 2007 -- the 10 surplus budgets which I brought down," Costello says of the OECD and IMF numbers.

On these measures, Paul Keating's headline budget surpluses in the late 1980s masked structural deficits.

The only structural deficit you should be worried about is the one Krudd is building at a rapid rate...and his one is real

[Jovial Monk]

bwahahaha quoting Costello to show how good Costello was.

Your crap re high taxes just proved that taxes were cut. Notice Carmody said company taxes were a higher part of the total tax take--your own quote? What happens you think to company profits, and hence company tax payments, in a recession? Plunges? leading to the structural deficit becoming a cash one? the volatile tax of the BCA budget submission?

DFAT figures show exports to East Asia went from $40Bn in 2001 to $160Bn in 2007. India (south Asia) also took radically more of our dirt. That will do as a boom until a better one comes along.

QED I think.

[IQSRLOW]

Oh look, monkeyman ignores the fact that the govt concocted the figures. How unusual for him to ignore facts

[Jovial Monk]

Reason Libs are looking at Labor winning 101 seats at the next election:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itUmT2LRPzo


And Gordon Brown will clean up the Tories as well! And the left made huge gains in France!

[Jovial Monk]

Oh look, monkeyman ignores the fact that the govt concocted the figures. How unusual for him to ignore facts

Costello concocted the figures.