Sunday, 14 August 2011

3 horsemen of the deficit

“Are you not the party of balanced budgets and debt elimination?” The reply was unequivocal, “Our goal is to grow the deficit as much as possible in order to create political space to eliminate government-funded programming. Until then, we want high deficits while lobbying for a balanced budget — and promoting social program cuts as the only solution.”
 from Apocalyptic crisis budgeting by Edmund Pries


http://vimeo.com/27353035


Flashback to the Harris government

...Through their new funding plan the government reduced education funding by an astonishing $987 million per year not counting the 1995-1997 reduction of $525 million bringing it to the grand total of $1.5 billion in education cuts in their first few years in office. 

...The plan however was to establish an elaborate crisis.  Senior Ministry of Education bureaucrats had released footage to the media of then Minister of Education John Snobelen stating "We need to invent a crisis in order to bring about change in the educational system."

Snobelen would go on to state on several different occasions during the recording:

“... if you don't bankrupt it well, if you don't create a great crisis," "Inventing a crisis is something we're not... intuitively good at," "they couldn't make the thing change, because we were late with the declared crisis," "how to bankrupt it... I like to think of it as 'creating a useful crisis'," "'Creating a useful crisis' is part of what it will be about" and finally, "But, yeah, we need to invent a crisis."
  
The point of creating a crisis was to legitimize policy changes that might otherwise be unpalatable.

Mismanaging During Storm (PDF) by Neville Britto

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