Alright, let me try this again. I have National's own numbers in front of me - I'll stick to the basics this time.
Things we know:
* National is promising $9.4b worth of tax cuts in the next three budgets. Except not. Because they're removing indexation (adjusting the tax brackets by inflation - the idea that was introduced and bagged in the Budget this year), they're essentially removing $500m of "tax cuts" over the same period.
So, taxes would be $8.9b lower under National than it would be under Labour, not $9.4b. Small point, but worth noting.
* National promises to cut $1.2b of waste over the next three fiscal years. The focus will be on "low quality spend [sic]", "economic and regional development", "welfare delivery". Can this be done? Labour says no, National says yes. But while this seems to be the most contentious issue, it's not the biggest.
* Debt, despite it not being the "$12.8b Wally" I thought it was, is still a very big number. National will be borrowing $3.5b more than Labour (or repaying $3.5b less, depending on how you look at it) to fund the tax cuts.
In their statement, they've labelled their net shortfall line "net additional". I'm not quite sure what they mean by "additional". I think it's short for "money additional to money we actually have".
Cute.
(The total "net additional" is $3.5b, and that's probably more accurate than my $3.2b figure, which is calculated from their debt as percentage of GDP figure, which of course contains gigantic rounding errors.)
* The second biggest cut, though, is "lower new budget spending allowance", sitting at $3b. As Cullen said in an earlier interview here, this doesn't represent new blow-outs, it's what's required to keep health/education spending up with the population requirements. Drop this, and the pressures on health/education spending will have no release, according to Cullen. The problem with Brash/Key's argument here is that they can't say they'll just cut the fat off the system and put it back into core spending, because they already cut the fat off in that $1.2b line above. This is real additional spending they're cutting - not "wasteful" spending.
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So yeah, it all adds up (minus another $600m in Law & Order spending and plus another $500m saving from scrapping Kiwisave) - a cut in sloppy spending here, a cut of real spending there, borrow for the rest. Hey presto, tax cuts.
That's all I got. Not nearly half as sexy, but pretty damn solid. Still feel like a bit of an arse for the stuff last night, but ah, live and learn. Hopefully this - less yelling, more calculating - will go some way to restoring my geek-creds.
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Lisa: If I'm going to bail the country out, I'll have to raise taxes, but in my speech, I'd like to avoid calling it a "painful emergency tax".
Milhouse: What about... "colossal salary grab"?
Lisa: See, that has the same problem. We need to soften the blow.
Milhouse: Well, if you just want to out-and-out lie... okay, we could call it a "temporary refund adjustment".
Lisa: I love it.
Milhouse: Really? What else do you love, Lisa?
Lisa: Fiscal solvency.
Milhouse: Oh. Yeah. Me too.