Random Jottings in a Dark Season

Sometimes things strike my fancy that are not worthy of articles in themselves, but I still feel I would like to share them.  I call them bagatelles.  Here are a few.

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MARIUS BENSON, ABC Radio’s political commentator, interviewed Chris Bowen earlier in the week about Labor’s costings and noted that its projected deficits over four years were $16bn more than the Coalition’s.  He wondered if this was ‘a gift to the government’.  Not a bit of it, replied Bowen, as might be expected. “The difference is only 0.2% of GDP,” he told us, implying that this was too insignificant to worry about, a rounding error perhaps.

Benson must have swallowed this line because later, he and SMH’s Peter Hartcher both pushed the same line.

Perhaps it did not occur to them that the total four-year accumulated deficits of the government, $84bn, also only amount to a paltry 1% of GDP.  Presumably nothing to worry about either – on that basis we could…