Tim's Bits and Pieces

I've heard several people talk about the cost of smoking to the Taxpayers in medical expenses. I've always been curious about whether the actual costs and savings (from premature deaths and taxes) of smoking are really that major, so when John Humphreys mentioned some of the statistics in a post on smoking I decided to do a more detailed examination of the costs.

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... Labour doesn't respect it. (Not that the Coalition are necessarily much better) Man Protests decision to make his farm a carbon sink:

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The Northern Territory [Labour] government is proposing raising the fines for begging to $6500. (They're also raising the fine for not keeping a yard clean) I find myself wondering why there is even a fine for begging, and I definitely wonder why they think it needs to be so high? Sure beggars are kind of well ugly and annoying, but still why should we introduce laws to punish the poorest members of a society for something that doesn't cause any harm to anyone else?

Apparently the Australian Christion Lobby supports wage caps:

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... well if we pretend these guys (including several Nobel laureates) don't exist.

How the government "injects money into the economy"¹. While it's true that the Queensland increase only amounts to 1.5% of the total stimulus, extrapolated out to the rest of the country it comes to around 20% (QLD Pop: 1.5M, Total Australian Pop: 20M), and then of course there's the Alcohol industry which probably experienced similar increases. (There's also smoking, illegal drugs, prostitutes, and other vices as well) In total we are talking around 40-50% of the the economic stimulus being wasted on vices².

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One of the guy's I work with said that "Obama was essential for the World as a whole!" (or words to the effect) and the idea has been running through my mind every since. What would the effect of Obama's election be on the rest of the world? He's for change sure, but what change? Would it be for the better or for the worse?

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Kevin Rudd warns of darkening financial times. That's strange, while far from perfect, things where looking pretty good before Rudd won the election. For example check out these statistics from the 2007-2008 budget, make sure to check out the next couple of pages as well. I suspect that this is just Rudd trying to protect himself from the political fall-out of his pathetic economic policy by blaming "global storm clouds" for any potential future economic woes in Australia.

So basically the Opposition wants to give everyone a tax cut totalling $9 billion and the ABC thinks that is a bad thing. Grrrr, stupid ABC and stupid Craig Emerson.

Well, this is interesting:

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