Written By: advantage - Date published: 9:34 am, December 20th, 2020 - 22 comments
New Zealand like most countries across the world in the last year, has gone deeper and deeper into public debt.
It’s pretty clear that the New Zealand government’s response to economic crisis from lockdowns and global trade crashes by spending tonnes of debt money has been extremely effective.
Yet for some, it’s simple: debts must always be paid back.
We can still remember how Greece was treated by Germany during the GFC: pay the public debt you owe to us, and suffer.
Surely our huge new debt means taxes have to get raised in the future?
comments
Police are investigating if a hired assassin shot him from 300m with a sniper
His family have applied for state-funded funeral but have been rejected
The family of a bikie who was assassinated at a drag race have asked taxpayers to fund his funeral.
Former Rebels boss Nick Martin was shot in the back at the Outlaw Nitro Challenge drag racing event at the Perth Motorplex at 8.30pm on 12 December.
ADVERTISEMENT
Police are investigating if a hired assassin picked him off with a sniper from 300 metres away while he watched the race with his wife and step-daughter.
Former Rebels boss Nick Martin (pictured with his wife) was shot in the back at the Outlaw Nitro Challenge drag racing event at the Perth Motorplex at 8.30pm on 12 December
We have won so far because geographical isolation gave us about a week of decision-making space to lock down hard.
The extra week was helpful – but much more important was being prepared to make that decision to lock-down hard. The Tory party would have been incapable of such a decision no matter how many extra weeks they were handed – and that was Ed s point. A National government here would have (most likely) been unable to make that decision. Scomo looked like he wasn t capable of that decision – but fortunately state premiers took it out of his hands. It took some guts to defy the belief of the most powerful sectors of society that they have an unfettered right to ongoing capital accumulation under all circumstances. Ardern had the guts and humanity to do it. However this remarkable effort at kicking business into line looks like it was just a one-off.
Summer warning: Australians risk skin cancer with aerosol sunscreens weeklytimesnow.com.au - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from weeklytimesnow.com.au Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Population has always been a critical driver of events and prior to the Industrial Revolution we lived in a zero sum world, with energy and resources effectively limited to that which could be harvested from photosynthesis, one person’s gain was at the limit, always someone else’s loss. Very low density hunter gather populations could thrive (often quite nicely) because they rarely approached their local resource limits, but the invention of agriculture changed this dramatically. The next 10,000 odd years of recorded history is a long story of
local competition for fundamentally constrained opportunities.
There were only three ways to survive and dominate, use what you had more efficiently, take what someone else already had, or move to somewhere not yet occupied. One drove warfare, conquest and empire, the other drove innovation and intensification … yet the diffuse and intermittent nature of sunshine and climate imposed a strict zero sum game on both of these strategies, a