ALP Costings and other electoral musings

Well Peter Martin has beaten me to it.

The costings of any opposition now should be quite reasonable as opposed to what has occurred in the past as Peter shows . The Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) is as good at providing costings for policies as the Treasury is. moreover the ALP also has three distinguished gentlemen to overlook all these PBO costings and say the total package is fine.
(Every Australian should than Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott for this. This was part of their list of demands to support Gillard.)

Thus there are no longer any 'black holes' as in 1987 or 'rubbery figures' behind the document as in Phil Lynch's infamous 1977 budget.
This lead to the government's response firing blanks. The costings could not be trusted there were no costings for policies on the platform that were not promises!

The main problem with both parties is their promise to keep the budget in surplus in their IF there is a slowdown. This is the worse policy response. Why so?

The state of the budget figures are mainly determined by the economy. Hence a slowdown will affect the budget because automatic stabilisers cut in. This is the cyclical part of the budget.
However it is the structural part of the budget that has the major effect on the economy.
Thus if the economy slows the cyclical part of the budget 'blows  out' because less taxes are coming in and more social welfare payments are going out. The government cannot directly control this part of the budget.
If the aim is to maintain a budget surplus in a slowing economy then the only policy response any government can have is a  larger structural surplus.

 Discerning readers will automatically recognise the contradiction here. The more you attempt to have a larger structural surplus the larger cyclical deficit you will have and the cyclical part of the budget is vastly larger than the structural part hence you not only have a weaker economy and a budget deficit anyway. This is the curse of classical economics.

On another perhaps related track the pollbludget talks about the election campaign.
As toy can see most reports are writing political gossip.
We know seat polls are crap. ( a highly technical term). so why are 'internal seat polls' reported at all?
Probably the greatest load of rubbish I read was that the Nationals had tracking polls in oe close seat.
Are they lazy, ignorant and simply have to write this rubbish because if they did not they would have nothing to write about. Why is this rubbish
1.The cost of tracking polls ( usually made daily) is quite high
2. If the National party has the money why this seat
3. Seat polls are useless
4. The margin is so high as too make useless even if the polls were of a good sample

Please note how can different journalists have different sources saying entirely opposite things?

One last thing. We are now into the last week of the campaign and we have only ONE poll released. WHAT has happened to ipsos and Reachtel? Are they to expensive for Channels 7 and 9?  Strange

At least it ends on Saturday