If economic stimulus (Government trying to win votes predominantly by wastage) is good then why is the US about to exceed 10% unemployment and print billions of dollars more notes. This is after spending billions on stimulus.

No doubt the same economist who totally failed to predict the GFC are now the ones pushing stimulus measure. How gullible can people be? Someone will wake up to the simple fact that you can't forever lend and not pay back. Of course Australia got away with great wastage because Howard/Costello put the money in the bank for the next lot of vandals. Labour just don't get it and now with the loony Greens it will be much worse.

Sadly, Andrew Leigh makes an implied comparison between 'Labor stimulus' and NO use of debt, all for rhetorical purposes. What real life gives is the balance between cautiously responsible use of borrowed money for raising productivity, and unsustainable consumption on credit.

The benefit-cost ration of stimulus spending is seriously doubtful. The happy assumption of past economists that governement spending creates 3 to 7 or so 'multiplier effect' dollars for a dollar of cost is no longer respectable; 1 to 1.3 seems more likely on recent information.

The use of Government subsidies with 'green' justifications has no proven long term returns and should be classified as self-indulgent discretionary spending.

The direct payment of stimulus to people was a great idea but sadly misdirected - I didn't get a bloody cent for all the tax I pay! Yet I support a family of six.

And as for those BER buildings - the more I learn the worse an investment it seems. It is just self-indulgent when the buildings just add to a perfectly adequate stock of school buildings, without any likelihood of increasing the quality of student or future productivity of graduates or the educational system. That too, is 100% consumption spending. 60% for the unions employed on the make-work scheme, and 40% for the rorted managemnt fees of Labor's business partners.

We are doing better than fifty or sixty years ago. I am not even sure we are working harder. Look at the quality and size of the houses we live in today. Look at the number of appliances that today are seen as necessary. In the past if, you had a small fridge, washing machine, iron and vacuum you were doing well. Shortage of power points was not an issue. Then the TV came. There were not phones in most homes. The lucky had one small car in the driveway. It was not unusual to rely on public transport. Furniture was hand downs, second hand or from Waltons on the “never never“. A school were over crowded and stays in hospitals long. Only the privilege did not leave school at fourteen and ten months. We did not need a room in the house to store the children’s toys. A small cupboard took care of the children’s clothes. It was the norm for two or three kids or more to share a room. Overseas holidays were unheard of. When mum worked, it was in some dirty factory or like place where she worked all day on a product lines or other manual labour. Wages were at least three quarters of what the lowest paid man earned. Welfare was paid to woman at the four fifths of what men received. Home ownership was for the wealthy. The lucky obtained liveable rental accommodation. The rest struggled on long lists for public housing that could not keep up with the demand. The above was the reality of the wool boom in the fifties.

People talk about the money that the government “injected” into the community without seeming to reflect that government first took this same money out of the community in the first place.

Those who approve of the economic benefits of this spending never seem to think about the economic benefits that could not take place in whatever alternative uses the people would have put their property to if government had not taken it. Since those economic benefits never took place, we will never know what they would have been.

But one thing we do know. The fact that tax is an involuntary payment demonstrates irrefutably that the people place a higher value on the alternative uses that they could have put their property to, than they place on the value that government did put it to. Thus whereas economising means devoting scarce resources to the most urgent and important human wants, government has devoted scarce resources to satisfying less urgent and less important human wants. In other words, what the government did was the opposite of economic activity; and it is mere fraud for them to claim that they provided a net economic benefit to the community by taxes, debt, spending and redistributions.

Its the old story .. everything is good IN MODERATION !

SOME stimulus was probably justifiable .. but was all of it necessary ? Especially the 'but a new television' handouts ... most of this was spent on IMPORTS of products made overseas ... not helping retain Australian jobs.

Many BER projects provided poor value for money at many times noprmal construction costs .. just rorting !

Even if the budget 'returns to surplus' in 2013, we still have to pay off the debt. Interest alone could well be in the order of $ 6 billion per year ... with a generaous surplus of, say, $ 15 billion per year, calculate how many years it will take to pay off $ 90 billion debt ... probably around 20 years !

Now ask: did we get value for money ?

It was Labor's Paul Keating who sold off the Commonwealth bank.We also sold off all our state banks.There is a thing called the fractional reserve system of banking whereby banks can create money in their computers and loan it our as debt.$91 billion of new money is added to our economy to equl GDP + inflation increases.Most of this money is now generated by the private banking system.This is why we are in so much debt.

Top priority should be to re-establish State bansk who can generate the cash for infrastructure.

see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D22TlYA8F2E