Budget Night motherfuckers!

[weemadando]

OK. Not long until the Budget Speech. Will Rudd desperately shift tack into going for how to vote payments and salvage the opinion polls or will he stick with his economic rebuilding in order to bring the Budget back into surplus sooner?

[Chris OFarrell]

He's gone on so much today about 'no frills' and 'sound financial management' today that I would *think* he is going for the later. And he'll spin that for the former, shouting on every radio station and TV station that it proves how awesome he is, cutting everything but middle class welfare to pay off the debt as quickly as possible. Of course, I'm also sure they'll include the revenue from this mining super profit tax in their forward estimates, despite not even having the legislation on paper.

Still.

Here we have the politicians debating about paying OFF the debt and if it'll be in 3 or 4 years and sniping at each other on the fastest way to do this. Up in the other half of the globe North of the equator, we have places like Greece where they don't have a hope in hell of doing so, and have huge chunks of the population whining about having to give up the gravey train...

[Count Chocula]

Hey our US Congress has until Memorial Day to vote for another $200 billion in spending additional crippling debt ruinous profligacy vitally important budget measures. I hope Australia's pols don't have their heads as far up their asses as ours do.

[Stark]

The media shrieking over the mining tax is pretty funny stuff; nobody has to look for where to blame when it comes to budget difficulties.

[The_Saint]

Is it me or aside from all the "get back into the black fast" and "squeeze as much out of the resources boom while it lasts" screamingfrom the media this budget seems to have been rather .... middle of the road... no big surprises, no "big ticket items", no big vote purchases but also no big upheavals...


or is that just me..

[Stofsk]

I watched the budget last night. Swan doesn't inspire me with much confidence. That said, the budget was pretty... meh.

[weemadando]

Yeah, it does actually seem like Rudd and Co manned up and decided that the nation should be put above their own electoral issues. A noble move, but still not enough for me to vote for them considering the laundry list of cock-ups that they've managed in their term.

Also, I love the miners all complaining about the tax on their profits. As if they don't have a staff of thousands of accountants already reworking their books to make it look like they're barely scraping by.

[bobalot]

It's certainly better than John Howard's election budgets which were full of inflationary handouts and bribes to pensioners (Literally one off payments).