Yesterday the New Zealand Budget was released and described as “surprisingly frilly” for a no-frills Budget. As a result, is it inflationary? My answer is “no idea” – I just wanted to use the same title as the Australian Budget post. You yell inflation at me and I say “monetary policy offset through higher interest […]
A common refrain when talking about unemployment benefits is the Iron Triangle of Welfare. If we are only going to spend a fixed amount on welfare payments, then there is a trade-off between the size of the payment and the incentive to work – where the incentive to work is captured by how much of […]
Last night was the Australian 2023/24 Budget. Like all Budgets it existed and was filled with politics – but I was surprised to find my twitter filled this morning with people calling it highly inflationary, and others saying it would reduce inflation. The arguments appear to be: I’m a bit slow, so I wanted to […]
In the last blog post I noted that there were rumors of a higher benefit rate for those over 55. Since then we’ve been thrown into an information vacuum in Australia, as noted here by David Plunket. After some detailed discussion in the e61 offices my boss (Gianni La Cava) snuck off and pulled together […]
Last week we’d been chatting about the unemployment benefit in Australia and the reasons why some unemployed people don’t get it, while some people who aren’t unemployed do. Everything boiled down to eligibility criteria – criteria that are intended to exclude those that aren’t deemed to need it. After realising this, my colleagues and I […]
I’ve now read the IRD and Treasury effective tax rate reports, and they’re good. I’ll read them a few more times before writing anything on them in a couple of weeks – but the authors of all these reports were really careful to provide rationale and scenarios to explain what all the different numbers meant. […]