Mike's Minute: Our debt numbers don't lie

Like so many of these things, a day or so after the big event is when you really get a measure of what is true and what is BS, or spin.

The PREFU was bad news.

The upside of the bad news was the Government argued and, sadly, the too many of the media, who either don’t have time to digest the real numbers, don’t care to digest the real numbers, or don’t know how to digest the real numbers, swallowed the line that there was "light at the end of the tunnel".

The light at the end of the tunnel came from a journalist in the gallery who are now famous for asking patsy questions. "Is there light at the end of the tunnel?" What do you think Grant Robertson was supposed to say to that?

A couple of the banks have put some perspective on where we are really at. These are real numbers and they involve debt.

Debt, as I keep trying to argue, is the thing that will sink us.

Debt is easy to get into, it's easy to get even deeper into, and then once you’ve been sucked into that it's a nightmare to get out of.

What we know from PREFU is the annual surplus, that's the yearly balance of whether you spent more than you earned, has been pushed out yet again. We can't even balance the books and annually haven't for years.

Then you get to what we already owe and what that costs to service. The updated figure was close to $10billion a year and that’s only the interest.

Now, the banks have put a number on what we will need to borrow going forward, what we need to go to the market for to cover the obligations the Government has made.

$1billion is what we will be borrowing. $940million to be exact.

Per week.

Let that sink in. Virtually one billion dollars a week of borrowings. Not earnings, not profit. More debt.

And you wonder why the bill to service that goes to almost $10billion a year. As the banks say, that is a lot for the market to absorb.

Here's a question; what if the market can't, or won't, absorb it?

The answer is we go to people who will give us the money. But what happens then is we pay a premium and the $10billion servicing bill climbs higher.

It can't be any more black and white than this. Look at what we spend on defence, or police. That's pocket change compared to what we borrow and that is why things are as bad as they are.

Numbers don't lie.

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