nz's economic future

My bet is 22/23 as Covid refugees head back overseas causing flood of houses to be sold and NZ is left with a loan reliant economy and diminishing exports to pay.Something like a 30 % increase in bureaucracy who are largely unproductive but taxpayer reliant for income and who haven't lost a days pay during covid plus rising interest rates on overseas loans ,You don't have to be Alan Greenspan to see what's coming ! (neither did he )

as an oz article about the challenges facing morrison and the country could easily have been jacinda and nz

the economist tells a story of problems building for biden and america that could easily be here

RAPIDLY RISING prices are as conspicuous as they are unpopular. Annual inflation of 6.8% has left American consumers even more anxious about the economy than they were during the pandemic-induced crisis in the spring of 2020. They are gloomy (see chart), even as many of them enjoy rising incomes, bargaining power over their employers—the result of a labour shortage—and soaring house prices. Their unease is a problem for President Joe Biden, whose economic management does not poll well. By one count, over two-thirds of voters disapprove of his record on inflation.

The White House is therefore now keen to fight the rise in prices. But Democrats are slipping into a bad habit that often afflicts politicians at such a moment: blaming greedy corporations and rigged markets instead of their own flawed policies. It is a recipe for more mistakes.

plans to increase competition among slaughterhouses, which he blames for a 16% rise in meat prices in the year to November. He has also called for investigations into the energy and shipping industries, the sources of recent shortages and bottlenecks.

Scrutinising concentrated markets may be a good idea, but it will not do much to fight inflation. It is absurd to think that corporations became more greedy over the past year or that markets are suddenly less competitive. Prices have accelerated in part because Mr Biden’s excessive economic stimulus led to a surge in spending on physical goods at a time when the pandemic had already bunged up global supply chains.

The danger of misdiagnosing the cause of inflation is that it eventually leads not just to irrelevant policies but to damaging ones. One risk is price controls. The Roosevelt Institute, a left-wing think-tank, has called for the federal government to “regulate and negotiate” more prices. Isabella Weber, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, wants “a systematic consideration of strategic price controls”. Both point to high corporate profits to support their arguments.

As America learned when President Richard Nixon froze prices and wages in 1971, controls would distort the economy and harm growth while at best delaying inflation. Today’s advocates tend to call for surgical interventions rather than across-the-board freezes, but it is naive to think that the bureaucracy could make a success of micromanaging the price mechanism.

It may seem far-fetched to think that politicians would resurrect policies that had been so thoroughly discredited.

The uncomfortable truth for Mr Biden is that the Federal Reserve, not the White House, controls the tool to bring down inflation: higher interest rates.

www.economist.com/leaders/2022/01/08/democrats-seem-drawn-to-hare-brained-schemes-to-control-inflation

Actually that’s an even simpler proxy for economic growth that any economic historian will confirm - population growth.

Population growth fuels economic growth. And smart (well-educated) population growth fuels more even efficient economic growth.

And smart immigration has a role in that if your organic population growth isn’t fast enough.

From conversations on the anchorage over the last few days with various young, mobile professionals looking to build their nest-egg it seems that AUS remains the biggest competitive threat to retaining NZ talent.

and just to add to the tax burden
www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/dennis-wesselbaum-the-governments-next-great-blunder-social-unemployment-insurance/2C4ZLMVMWKQ3SXDQ3HCST7OV3Y/?utm_source=pocket_mylist

there's no intention of reducing the tax burden on the middle-class, quite the opposite in fact

this is a way to increase the tax burden on the middle class by shifting as much as possible of the current gov. spending on them, on to them 

what they want to do is redistribute (future?) earnings + savings from those that have them, to those that don't

kiwisaver is a way to make people who have jobs pay for their own 'many-options pensions', so the general pension fund can afford to continue offering 'fewer-option pensions' for those that never paid much tax as they never had 40? years of full-time work

likewise, a compulsory 'unemployment insurance' is a way to make people with jobs fund their own unemployment benefits between jobs

so that the dole/unemployment benefit/jobseeker allowance can continue to fund those that never really work full-time

all trying to achieve 'outputs' as equal as possible

from differing 'inputs'

there will presumably be bureaucrats beavering away right now on ways to get more middle-class earnings spent on private health insurance and private schools

a delicate balance, because the middle-class expect to see some benefit from this extra spending that is being pushed on them

while the gov. is largely committed to ensuring there is no difference between education and health outcomes

incredibly hard to have your cake and eat it

but it's such a tempting proposition millions of man?hours get wasted on it every year

much in the same way ancient alchemists tried to find ways to turn base materials into gold 

can't do it as it can't be done

but the dream is SO powerful

hard to see how it won't end in a workers exodus now we no longer import workers

and in the growing anti-work culture

Ford is an early pioneer of the "antiwork" movement, which encourages followers to work as little as possible in traditional jobs or abandon them altogether for self-employment, with the goal of prioritising leisure time.

She is also a moderator of r/antiwork, the influential thread on internet forum Reddit. Its membership has ballooned from 180,000 in October 2020 to 1.6m this month as the coronavirus crisis leads many to re-evaluate their careers.

Huge numbers of Americans quit their jobs last year, including 4.5m in November, the labour department reported on Tuesday. That was the highest "quit rate" since the department began tracking it in 2001.

Their numbers are sufficient to prompt Goldman Sachs to warn in a November research note that the antiwork movement posed a "long-run risk" to labour force participation.

The antiwork movement traces its ideology back to Marxist texts suggesting that humanity could evolve beyond the requirement to work for a living.

www.nzherald.co.nz/business/reddit-antiwork-forum-booms-as-millions-of-americans-quit-jobs/QSFG7JIHRVCS2JHRM25Q7JNKYQ/