Posts by Idiot Savant
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Actually RB, I am surprised that bloggers have provided precious little commentary about macroeconomic policy rather than soft political opinion lately
Well, it's serious wonkery, rather abstract, and easy to get wrong. I dabble a bit, but I'd rather leave it to people who know rather more than me.
Hmmm. Time to grovel for a guest column, I think.
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He has been a good breeder
Que? Has he been working in the animal husbandry industry, or are you simply trying to say he's straight?
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The paradox at the heart of our monetary policy is that raising interest rates to control domestic demand/house prices also messes with our productive sector, both by raising the cost of capital for business and by raising the exchange rate.
The real paradox is that it makes the country more attractive to overseas hot money - so foreigners throw their money at our banks, who then desperately try to lend it out. The increased access to credit pushes along the housing bubble, which drives inflation higher, which in turn drives up interest rates. Our efforts to solve the problem have instead created a counterproductive vicious circle.
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I don't know about you, but I've felt weirdly switched off from politics this year. It has seemed petty and irrelevant, at a time when important challenges face us.
Ditto - and I'm a junkie. The government has been treading water, doing makework legislation for most of that time, with previous little actual policy able to be advanced. This will change a little with the budget and upcoming electoral reform and climate change legislation, but after that they'll be stretching to find anything interesting, let alone inspiring.
Combine it with the toxic tactics we've seen over the past few years, and its enough to make anyone turn off. And politicians wonder why so many people hold them in contempt...
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Hooning around in Bata Bullets saying words backwards was, er, trendy.
Unless you're a musician, in which case its evidence of Satanism.
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She doesn't watch the TV news as much as I did at her age, although her child's bat antennae can pick up a news item about the smacking debate from four rooms away, and she will scamper to the source to hear more.
Would it be rude to ask what her opinion of the law is?
Children have been pretty silent over s59 (hell, they're pretty silent
on most political issues - and who can blame them? When you're a kid,
there are usually far more important issues, like playing with not-Lego
:) , but it would be nice to see what the people most affected think about it. -
A better public housing programme could help adjust the market.
Yes - but can you imagine property investors (including the large number of MPs who own investment properties) taking that lying down. Or will we see an advertising campaign saying "the government wants to devalue your biggest asset"?
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Buying each others' houses has been a poor substitute for real economic enterprise.
Except that investing in the sharemarket isn't "real economic enterprise", any more than buying a house is. It's speculation. And the reason so many rich shareholders and brokers are pushing it is in the hope of creating an inflationary bubble and getting more greater fools to sucker.
The exception to this, of course, is investing through actual capital raisings. Those actually do something. But if you buy existing shares in an existing business, you're doing nothing but gambling. Which is fine, if that's how you get your kicks - but we shouldn't pretend its helping the economy.
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Neil: The number you're looking for is that agriculture is responsible for 50% of export earnings. But those earnings come at a cost of around $600 million a year, which currently the rest of us are paying for, and which farmers effectively pocket as a subsidy.
All I am advocating is that they pay their own way, rather than having their profits supported by the rest of us. And if this causes some of them to go out of business, then they were never really economic in the first place.
Kyle:
The various forms of farming provide the vast majority of meat in our diets, and it would be a massive economic and cultural change if the price of meat suddenly greatly increased. There would also be a big impact upon dairy products, including milk.
Hardly. I don't know about meat, but I've done the maths on milk, and if farmers were required to pay for the cost of their emissions, and those costs were passed on to consumers, it would raise the price by 1.6 cents a litre - roughly 1%. That's not a big impact, and its hardly likely to lead to the serious health impacts you're insinuating.
(Meat has lower emissions per animal, but is complicated by the fact that they don't use the whole cow, and by the variable pricing of the bits. Sometime I'll look for some raw numbers and see if I can nut it out, but my initial estimate is that the impact will be just as negligible).
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Our discussions in NZ were more about Kyoto and why NZ is the ONLY country that records the cow fart methane and are then duly taxed immensely for our emissions. Is this true?
Nope. Every UNFCCC member is required to measure their emissions, including those from agricultural sources. It's just that its a much smaller proportion in most of the countries we like to compare ourselves to because a) they're industrialised; and b) they generate most of their energy from coal or gas rather than hydro.
And we don't tax farmers for their emissions. We should - the alternative is that the rest of us effectively subsidise the farming elite to the tune of $600 million a year - but no government has seriously considered it yet. A poll tax to internalise the emissions cost of agriculture was notably absent from the government's recent options document on the subject.
that the farmers in NZ are the ones taking the blame.
That is because, as far as New Zealand is concerned, they are to blame. Agriculture was responsible for 49.4% of our greenhouse gas emissions in 2004. That's from less than 1% of our population. The other 99% of us, all our electricity, SUVs, air conditioners, and industry, generate the other 50.6%. When you look at it that way, it's pretty clear who the culprit is.
(And before anyone gets on their high horse about how valuable farming is, this isn't the nineteenth century anymore. Agriculture contributes only 5% of total GDP and 3.3% of total employment (and that includes first-stage processing). Those claims of special status may have been true in the past, but not anymore).