How are you feeling about Budget 2015? Aside from the more tax we will be paying that we suspected we would be paying and that VERY BIG increase in the price of petrol – are you in the camp that says the Minister did a good job with what he had and has made all the right noises – or the group that says this Budget did nothing for growth, was very light on detail and is just more of the same that has gotten us nowhere?
I might have to be in a new camp here – I am sure there could be many of those. I appreciate that the Minister said nothing drastic and has no drastic plans. Too much of a shock is not a good thing. I also appreciate that he allocates – others spend. And ultimately the problem may be more with the spending side than the allocation side.
However, (what would I write about if there wasn’t a but) we have been doing the ‘good stable responsible ‘ budgets for years and growth is going backwards. The question I have is if we had implemented what we said we would have implemented would we be in a poor growth situation? Let’s say the answer to this is no – we would be on a better growth path. Then it is not the Budget that needs to change. If it is yes – the Budget needs to change drastically.
My second however then relates to implementation and plans. What is the point of a plan that is never implemented? Surely there must be a time limit on these things and when it clearly is not working you cut your losses and change. (This by the way is a fairly common investor trait – hanging on to losers for too long).
Surely after 20 years of pfaffing around we have to realise something drastic does need to happen.
Is it a coincidence that as the public sector gets bigger SA gets less productive and less efficient?
I was doing some reading over the weekend on unemployment. Since the 90s unemployment has been seen as our biggest problem. So no news there. In part this is an education problem. But we’ve also had 20 years to fix that. One of the papers I read looked at where unemployment had been radically reduced – in conditions of investment and where government spending dropped.
Something has gone really wrong – and while the Minister had to make the right ratings agencies noises – we need more acknowledgement that we need new action to get on a growth path.
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