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Steve Pierson over at the Standard is criticising National’s stimulus package, and the quality of economic journalism. Now, although I’m always happy to criticise things too I feel that some of his critiques are a bit harsh.
I’ll go through the two harshest criticisms below:
Just when I thought that the suggestions from the Job Summit couldn’t get to much worse (given my faith in the current government not to go all Muldoonist on me), some suggestions on the tourism fund have come out.
Subsidised airline tickets for travellers from countries such as Britain and the United States are also being suggested
Hopefully this is just the Dom Post talking a bit of rubbish – because it isn’t in New Zealand’s interest to become protectionist now. This is protectionism after all – we are subsidising our tourism exports in order to arbitrarily make them more competitive.
If we want tariffs on beef and lamb to be removed, we should avoid implementing our own tariffs/subsidies. I believe that asking for greater free trade and then introducing protectionism is officially termed “hypocrisy” – I’m hoping we don’t head down that road.
Kiwiblog appears to be pro the Job Summit – the complete opposite of the position we have taken.
However, so far David Farrar has given more detail as to why he feels like he does. As a result, we really need to discuss things a little bit more.
Now David mentions the main “potential policies” to come out of the summit were:
Ok, so let me talk about them a little.
Source(SMBC)
I think economists can relate … (to the first part – not so much the conclusion)
Give an independent body (akin to the RBNZ) the ability to set tax rates
Discuss (but preferably read the article first 🙂 )
There is one thing I would like to make clear to people when they read our posts – we are sceptical people.
Even so, I like to think we are equally cynical about government and private institutions when we discuss things.
On top of that – we often try to put our scepticism to one side to discuss “idealised” versions of both government and private institutions. This does not mean we favour one over the other – it just means that in order to study the failure on one independently we need to make unsatisfactory assumptions in other places.
As a result, if our “implicit value judgments” on government/market failure/success upset you remember two things:
Now we frame our blog as relatively “pro-government”. This implies that we solely tend to focus on areas where the government could succeed rather than when it could fail – not that we believe governments are truly less likely to fail than the market. The distinction is important.
If you believe government fails more than we do – tell us in the comments or even write your own blog posts. Trust me, there isn’t enough time in the day to study every side of an issue – so we will be very happy to see other people taking the other side