I don’t buy that for a second. Without JobKeeper we would have been f**ked.
It was pretty obvious to anyone watching the numbers in Sept and Dec qtrs of last year that there was inherent weakness in the economy and that the government was reluctant to spend in order to protect their projected surplus.
Economists were almost universal in their appeals to government to provide some form of stimulus, and there were projections of a recession being possible, perhaps even likely before the advent of covid.
The government wasn't listening, because they valued the political upside of a surplus far greater than the economic reality that running a surplus is contractionary policy. Obviously they thought that growth would have held enough to have avoided a technical recession. womp womp.
This is thole f**king problem with the economic argument in this country, running a surplus is seen as the gold standard of economic management, when in reality it's the last thing you want to be doing if growth is insipid, as it was.
It blows my mind that people can still hang on to these myths, such as the constant warnings by the government prior to the pandemic that we needed to save for a rainy day, lest a shock come along and we couldn't afford to react. Or that the only reason we could respond so effectively to the GFC was that we had money in the bank. Yet here we are with the government apparently magicing 200 odd billion dollars of deficit out of thin air, and it's cudos all 'round from the deficit hawks.
I think we can count our lucky stars Shorten wasn't in charge. Half of us would be on the street by now.
It was a brilliant performance by the government.Prob best in the world.
So a Labor government who were consistently vilified through the GFC for overspending on stimulus, by the very same people who are now in charge, who howled like banshees over a so called "debt and deficit disaster", would not have spent enough in order to keep people afloat?
As opposed to the ideologically committed deficit hawks of the LNP.
What is the basis of this fantasy land in which you dwell?
The only argument I can see where this is a possibility is that the LNP in opposition would hammer the government so hard on deficit spending, that they might have been a little gun shy and slow to pull the trigger.
Now I 'aint knocking the governments response thus far, it's been pretty effective, despite some massive misallocations in their spending in terms of need, but this is all pretty basic stuff. It's amazing though how they simply get a free pass here. Despite a recession that in reality we really didn't need to have.
