Budget 2019

[BBSA]

There goes a huge chunk of skills.

And they just shifting the cost to the government’s pension fund.

 

[Sinbad]

And they just shifting the cost to the government’s pension fund.

And to the consulting bill

 

[Zoomzoom]

I would have thought that they realised that the price of petrol is a HUGE factor in the price of everything and that putting it up drastically has a detrimental effect on people's ability to eat.

 

[ForceFate]

The crisis this country faces is not just Eskom but the fact that 1/3 of the entire budget (R567 billion) being just social grants. 1/3 of all tax money is thrown down the drain to to keep people living on the breadline alive instead of being spent on improving/investing in the country.

How many other countries spend such a large portion of their budget on social grants?

How much do countries like UK spend?

 

[Lew Skannen]

You encourage lawlessness but become visibly anxious when it bites you...
Ok

I bite back, that's all.

Nonetheless, I am not discouraging anything at all. Most smokers I know already smoke the more affordable illegally imported stuff. No need for me to tell people how to protect themselves against a corrupt government, they already know where and how they can protect themselves and their money from the thieves and the poor.

 

[BBSA]

There is a line in Finance Minister Tito Mboweni's brutally honest 2019 Budget Speech that I can't get out of my head.

"We are borrowing R1.2bn a day."

Read that again. Let it sink in. If you ever doubted that South Africa's economy was in deep, deep trouble, doubt no more.

Some perspective: R1.2bn is the value of Bosasa's biggest two tenders, combined, that we borrow per day. Or: with R1.2bn, you can build about 8 000 low-cost houses. And that is what we borrow per day.

We are borrowing just to keep the lights on, to service our debt and to keep the state ticking.

Any Grade 10 learner with a basic grasp of mathematics will tell you that we are doomed to fail if we keep on spending more than what we earn. It's literally that simple.

Mboweni had the tough job of breaking this news to South Africans. He didn't mince his words and his ANC colleagues sat stone-faced as he punted selling off non-strategic state-owned enterprises, reducing the size of the civil service and reducing the staff at hundreds of our embassies around the world.

https://m.news24.com/Columnists/Adr...rupt-and-people-will-lose-their-jobs-20190225

 

[Sinbad]

How much do countries like UK spend?

https://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_welfare_spending_40.html
Welfare, 115bn GBP

Total spend 817bn GBP

So 14 percent.

 

[Zoomzoom]

There is a line in Finance Minister Tito Mboweni's brutally honest 2019 Budget Speech that I can't get out of my head.

"We are borrowing R1.2bn a day."

Read that again. Let it sink in. If you ever doubted that South Africa's economy was in deep, deep trouble, doubt no more.

Some perspective: R1.2bn is the value of Bosasa's biggest two tenders, combined, that we borrow per day. Or: with R1.2bn, you can build about 8 000 low-cost houses. And that is what we borrow per day.

We are borrowing just to keep the lights on, to service our debt and to keep the state ticking.

Any Grade 10 learner with a basic grasp of mathematics will tell you that we are doomed to fail if we keep on spending more than what we earn. It's literally that simple.

Mboweni had the tough job of breaking this news to South Africans. He didn't mince his words and his ANC colleagues sat stone-faced as he punted selling off non-strategic state-owned enterprises, reducing the size of the civil service and reducing the staff at hundreds of our embassies around the world.

https://m.news24.com/Columnists/Adr...rupt-and-people-will-lose-their-jobs-20190225

Everytime I have ever said that running a country should be no different from keeping your household budget straight, i.e. money out should not exceed money in or else you are in the dwang and have been shouted down for not understanding the apparently huge importance of national debt. I still don't understand national debt and I still think that money out should not exceed money in .... this is why.

 

[NarrowBandFtw]

https://m.news24.com/Columnists/Adr...rupt-and-people-will-lose-their-jobs-20190225

Fairly good write-up, but he just couldn't resist playing the apartheid card could he:

How did we get here? I'm no economist, but there are probably three main reasons: a bloated civil service, corruption and inheriting a state that was engineered to look only after a minority

Funny how the infrastructure inherited mostly has gone backwards i.e. it's not a case of just not expanding rapidly enough, it actually regressed, that apartheid's fault too?!?

 

[TysonRoux]