Mike's Minute: Labour's policy shows they haven't learnt a thing

It seems the labour party has not learned a thing about running a country.

Their first policy for next years vote is out, so congrats on that. The first cab off the rank is a wealth fund.

The idea is not necessarily a bad one. You take money from dividends and distribute it out about the place to create jobs.

The obvious questions though …were not answered.

How much does it cost? …don't know.

What industries or entities or businesses are involved? …don’t know.

How many jobs will it create? …don't know.

Who decides who gets what? …don’t know.

Those are the specific  faults in what really is just a very broad brush sort of thought bubble.

The more pressing issue economically comes in the form of a simple truth.

And the simple truth is, given you haven't magicked up the money it has come from a business, lets say it’s a power company, the company pays the government a dividend...that already happens...currently that dividend goes into the consolidated fund i.e. the government's coffers. That money pays bills, currently one of the biggest bills is the interest on our debt. That bill is getting close to 10 billion dollars a year.

Now if you aren't using the dividend money to pay bills because you have siphoned it off to pay for your wealth fund, where is the money for the bills going to come from?

At all points you only ever have a finite amount of money. If some of those dollars go one way, they cant go another.

And unless you can explain  how you cover the gap, you are merely prioritising one thing over another.

Its like increasing the car payment, but doing it by paying less on the mortgage

Which in this case brings in labours attitude to debt. Given they are the ones who dug our current debt hole, It looks like they still haven't worked out that it wasn’t a very smart move.

If they are to stand a chance next year, they will need to sharpen their policy act up considerably to something a lot better refined than some blue sky psycho babble.

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