Budgets
Peter Costello presented this year’s budget in Parliament last night, and it looks like lobster and champagne for everyone with a corner office. Again. Tax cuts at the upper reaches of income exceed those granted to the middle class and the poor by a significant factor, with the idea that this will help the economy to stay as robust as it has been. Unfortunately, just because the already wealthy get to keep more of their income there isn’t a correlative effect in terms of job-creation. Granted, if I can afford a new car or to renovate my kitchen, that helps (momentarily) keep automobile manufacturers in profitability or to give a tradesman a couple of days’ work, but the trickle-down theory of economics has been thoroughly discredited, even by its creators, so if anyone expects a top-end tax cut to create a new auto plant or to help gyprockers make ends meet, well, that must be why you voted for Howard (or Bush for that matter; except in his case it’s also because you want to be sure your children learn creationism over evolution at school). M. & I, for example, are living pretty close to the bone these days, and we stand to increase our take-home pay over the next two years from 1st July by less than AU$1,000, even after my next award increase, next year. It’ll pay for a few coffees, but it’s sure not going to help with the bills.

To be fair, I congratulate the Liberals with running a surplus; that’s no mean feat. I think, however, that there’s more to the budget than what you don’t spend. There’s also how you spend. I’m not going to kick over paying taxes, but if the government’s going to give it back, I’d like to see some substantial relief, for the poor and the middle class. We are, after all, the ones who carry the rest of the population, not the other way around. And while the government guts Medicare, reneging on its promises to ease that burden, they’re also making it harder to sustain private care coverage. In the end, these tax cuts amount to a brief caress administered in the middle of a beating.