Bottom line is there's no magic number
A lot of the problems we cause ourselves arise from the way we've evolved to economise on thinking time by taking mental shortcuts.
Ross Gittins is economics editor of the SMH and an economic columnist for The Age. His books include Gittins' Guide to Economics, Gittinomics and The Happy Economist.
A lot of the problems we cause ourselves arise from the way we've evolved to economise on thinking time by taking mental shortcuts.
Since the reform push has degenerated into little more than business rent-seeking it's neither surprising nor regrettable that voters have called a halt.
Our foreign debt will grow and it already exceeds $1 trillion deficit. But that's not necessarily bad.
I realised Australian government was fast approaching peak fake when I read Laura Tingle of the Financial Review's revelation that Malcolm Turnbull's Snowy 2.0 announcement was timed to favourably influence the imminent fortnightly Newspoll result.
If I was on the minimum wage, however, I wouldn't start spending the increase yet.
Smoke signals from Canberra suggest that all the government will manage to get through the Senate is a reduction to 27.5 per cent in the tax rate applying to companies with turnover of less than $10 million a year.
Economists may not be much chop at forecasting how fast the economy will grow in the next year or two, but that doesn't mean they haven't learnt a few things about how economies work.
The nation's budget problem still won't be solved when, one day in the distant future, we get the federal budget back into surplus. Only a change in strategy is likely to produce a sustained solution.
If you learn nothing else about the economy, remember that it moves not in straight lines but in cycles of good times followed by bad times, and bad times followed by good.
There's no clearer sign that the Turnbull government is in deep political trouble than the never-ending saga of the Centrelink robo-debt stuff-up.
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