Comments by "" (@pwillis1589) on "Australia should use its advantage in iron ore to ensure we can 'retire the debt': Palmer" video.

  1. WTF. How short are peoples memory. The Rudd government attempted a super profits tax on iron ore and got smashed for it. The Gillard government passed the Mineral Resource Rent Tax which the Abbott LNP government repealed.
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  2.  @Neil-yg5gm  Exactly. Immediately cut all federal funding to private schools and private hospitals and private health insurance. Immediately cut the aged pension, disability pension, Job seeker payments gone. Immediately charge full market rent for all public housing. Negative gearing gone. Discount on capital gains tax gone. Tax all superannuation. No more free rides for anyone.
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  3.  @Neil-yg5gm  So you mean to cut defence spending back to 1.7% of GDP not the current 2.2%. Good choice, that will save ten of billions of $ but that's not Liberal policy and actually runs completely opposite to the current governments narrative. Pretty much all the items I identified were the items the Howard government cut services to, particularly aged care where the Liberal government saved billions of $ by deregulation and privatisation. You say wrong but I have shown conclusively that these were the services that the Howard government cut, plus it added tax cuts. So yeah let's insist now on any government giving us all a gaint tax cut to help reduce the debt. I'm sorry you seem to have some idealised memory of the past. The Howard government breezed through an economic golden time when the whole world was prospering, then the GFC hit and tax receipts shrunk dramatically and the Rudd/Gillard government ran deficit budgets to keep us out of a recession that the rest of the OECD had. Despite promising the Liberal government in 9 years still hasn't been able to run a single surplus budget. So no I'm not wrong, I'm historically factual and understand the economic situation of different times. Just saying do what Howard did when the cuts I mentioned is exactly what Howard did proves you are wrong.
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  4.  @Neil-yg5gm  Yes What you said is correct and before Howard the Hawke/Keating governments ran surplus budgets and before that the Frasier government ran deficit budgets. So you have a history of both sides of government in the last fifty years running both surplus and deficit budgets. What's your point? What you in your political ideology fail to acknowledge is the economic context of the time. I can just say the Frasier Liberal government ran deficit budgets Hawke ran surplus budgets vote Labor in the future. I'm factually correct but it is meaningless unless you add context.
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  5.  @Neil-yg5gm  In the US the Democrat Clinton administration ran surplus budgets through the 90s.
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  6.  @Neil-yg5gm  Yes I completely agree with that statement. However as I said the cost of those surplus budgets and debt repayment was in one insatnce for example that people in aged care are malnourished as less than $5 a day was spent on meals in nursing homes. So you have a choice mistreat the elderly by denying them quality care or run surplus budgets and pay down the national debt you can't have both. Choose. You can't spend 2.2% of GDP on defence and pay down the debt. Choose again.
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  7.  @Neil-yg5gm  Just doing a bit of spitballing rough maths which I'm not particularly good at but bear with me. In the 2003 Howard/Costello budget 1.62% of GDP was spent on defence. In the Morrison/Fryburg 2022 budget that had increased to 2.2% which is roughly a 50% increase. So if we reduce the defence budget back to the Howard era numbers we save $24 billion, thats a quarter of the 2022 deficient gone. Where else would you save the other $60 billion?
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  8.  @Neil-yg5gm  Your data is impeccable, however how do you suppose we reduce that debt. In the short term its either increase tax or reduced spending. So assuming you are not prepared to pay more tax where are you going to reduce spending? Are you happy with schools closing and class sizes increasing to 60 or 70? Stop HECS and make all university courses full fee paying. Close hospital beds and reduce Medicare payments? Make people pay for elective surgery in public hospitals? I could go on, but what politican is going to get elected on any of those policies?
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  9.  @Neil-yg5gm  And don’t forget household debt, it is significantly higher than our national debt at around $2.5 trillion, how do we deal with that.
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