Finance Minister Bill English announced the glad tidings, just before the Christmas break. A Budget deficit of $13.3 billion [or is that $15.5 billion?] – that's 13.3 thousand million dollars expenditure over income – in addition to our horrendous debt level!
The prognosis for the next 4or 5 years is not too bright either.
It would seem we are moving to a situation similar to Iceland, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, and Spain plus Britain, France and Italy, all of whom are mired in an abyss of non-repayable debt.
Now the International Banking cartel – who encouraged these administrations into ever deeper debt – are setting the conditions for these freely elected governments to burden their electorates with austerity measures.
A Treasury trained Bill English and an Investment Banker John Key, do not have the solutions – they are in fact part of the problem! Simply because fiscal/financial orthodoxy is trained and ingrained into their thinking and actions. If it weren't so they wouldn't be in the positions they are in.
They are incapable of thinking outside the square.
So we get more of the same. ‘Export or die'. ‘Borrow and hope'. ‘Too much money in circulation causes inflation' and the falsity that ‘free trade with other nations is our salvation'
They, and others like them, fail to notice that the banking, military, industrial, oil, pharmaceutical etc corporations become ever more rich and powerful at the expense of the powerless majority!
Ralph Jordan, Parkvale.