We're one of a half doze or so countries who have never ever tried extremely popular elsewhere, thirty year self terminating bonds, to get our infrastructure built!

This creates additional economic activity and allows the revenue raised by the finished projects to actually pay for themselves!

Whereas, if we wait a couple of decades until there's sufficient money in government coffers, we invariably pay treble what it costs today.

Paying triple for something you can build today as self funded projects, is what I call living beyond your means.

And if we live beyond our means, we also do so with unaffordable negative gearing, and tax subsidies on super for the rich.

Alan Jones said on Q+A recently, "The top tax rate is 48 cents in the dollar, yet if I invest a large portion of my salary in super, I can get 33 cents in the dollar knocked off my tax bill"! "Meaning, my rate is effectively reduced to 15 cents in the dollar".

Lots of ordinary folk can't get much lower than 30 cents in the dollar, and will soon pay more than that even though their circumstances remain largely unchanged, thanks to bracket creep. Someone else is then living beyond their means for them!

And don't start me on the PM's even more unaffordable PPL!

And yes, it has gone in the too hard basket never ever to be tried or rolled out ever again. NEVER EVER!

Reportedly around 40% of our tax dollars disappears as part of the cost to us of collecting and reconciling it. Paying for that, is also how we live beyond our means!

And as Foyle suggests, we'd save some money if we didn't have state governments?

With one single exception we are the most over-governed country in the world! 70 billions per for something we just don't need is what I call living beyond your means.
Rhrosty.

There are many sides to this problem, but in Australia’s case, we need to start looking at the behaviour of the speculators, especially in the currency markets and real estate.

Ireland and Spain experienced a 500% rise in real estate prices in the first decade after 2000, when the European banks were flush with money and poured their funds into these countries’ real estate markets. In the case of Portugal, currency speculators drove up interest rates on borrowing beyond what the government could afford. In the case of Greece, Goldman Sachs cooked the books to allow it to enter the Euro.

In all these cases, the EU troika kept on lending despite the warning signs that it was creating massive speculative bubbles waiting to pop. When the bubble did burst, rather than allow the affected countries to trade out of their distress, they forced on them a crippling austerity regime that effectively destroyed their economies, making it impossible for them to ever repay their speculative debts.

Australia should heed the warnings. A massively overpriced real estate market, an increasingly unstable currency and banks that are pushing to inflate their already overpriced profits by lending like it’s going out of fashion are red flag alerts. The more austerity measures inflicted on the Australian economy now, the less chance we will ever have of addressing the speculative bubble crisis when it finally bursts.

And it WILL burst. It’s only a case of when, not if.