Cuts to foreign aid are expected to save the government’s coffers up to $3 billion. But let’s not forget Wayne Swan declared in 2012 that Australia’s 23 million people needed to bail out the 500 million people of the destitute Eurozone, and the basket-case-that-is-the–EU desperately needed $7 billion from us.
Is there a better argument to show why big government is a big-fail than just saying, E.U.? It takes real skill to start with 20 successful economies and combine them into one large bankrupt entity — and all this in only a decade-and-a-half.
For Australians, seven billion dollars is $320 per man, woman and child. That was nearly $1,300 per household of four.
If someone had knocked on your door with a registered E.U. tin, would you have felt compelled to give $1,300 (of non-tax deductible income) to rescue the poor bankers and burdensome bureaucrats of Europe? Perhaps you might have chosen instead to get a new fridge, take the family on a holiday, or pay for private tutoring for your teenager. But thanks to Swan and the force of big government, you didn’t get that chance. As it happens, Australia doesn’t have the cash to pay it anyway, so the government borrowed $7 billion and we’ll pay the interest, as well as the debt. Good-o.
It’s OK though, Swan tells us “but it won’t involve donating cash into a relief fund.” I’m so relieved.
Instead, we are borrowing money we don’t have, to rescue the regulators, bail-out the bureaucrats, and keep the EU politicians in their cushy but overpaid, net-drain employment who made mistaken decisions we had no role in.
Meanwhile people in Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Afghanistan, and Bangladesh will just have to make do with a bit less (and, if the Eurocrats get their way, no prospect of life-changing cheap power anytime soon). I’m sure they feel a warm glow knowing their new water-wells, schools, or vaccinations are delayed for a “good cause”.
The opposition estimate Gillard will leave us with a gross debt of more than $270 billion. The cost of five years of mismanaged big-government was that even above the thousands paid in five years of tax, the average person owes another $12,000 dollars — or nearly $50k for a family of four.
What would your household have done with an extra $50k?
When will voters realize the true cost of the parasitic-political class, which voted to rescue fellow parasites rather than the poorest of the poor? What do we call this group who use the goodwill and productivity of others to fund their own mistakes through regulations and coercion: polarasites, politisites?
Budget night in Australia tonight. More fun.
*Minor edits to make it clear the $7b decision was made in 2012.