The economics journalists were out in force again today in Australia after being fed their latest copy from the neo-liberal propaganda machine. In this case, the propaganda was in the form of the first report published yesterday (May 22, 2013) from the newly established Parliamentary Budget Office – Estimates of the structural budget balance of the Australian Government 2001-02 to 2016-17. The Report estimates that huge unsustainable budget deficits and has led to a flurry of media activity all just repeating what the PBO told them was the message. I wonder if any of the journalists have actually read the report in detail particularly the Appendix where the technicalities are exposed. Technicalities is too strong a word because it suggests there is something robust going on. Nothing could be further from the truth. This is another shoddy attempt to bias the public perception towards thinking the current (pitifully small relative to the scale of the problem) budget deficit is problematic.

There was a time, in better days, that the evening news had news, sport and weather. Then, at some point, around the 1980s the national news started to host a Finance segment. Sometimes these segments are meagre reporting of what happened in the share markets. Even that benign news is symptomatic of the way neo-liberalism has infested our daily thinking and made the common folk feel part of the game that they are really can never be part of – wealth creation. At other times, the finance segments introduce economic theory and analysis as if it is news. Then the insidious nature of the neo-liberal propaganda machine becomes stark. But the starkness is lost on most because they think it is news and we have been led to believe that what gets pumped out at 19:00 on the national broadcaster (and other times by other broadcasters) are facts. Facts don’t lie do they? Well, when it comes to finance segments they are mostly lies.

It is budget time in Australia this month. The federal government will release their Budget next Tuesday and the State and Territory governments all put them out around the same time. Yesterday, it was the turn of one of our larger states Victoria. I will come to that in a moment. The mania intensifies around May and every day and night on TV, radio and in the printed media there is a constant commentariat and an almost uniform message, which was summarised by one so-called expert last night – “the Budget is broken”. I remember this chap in the 1980s as a junior Treasury official aspiring to be important. I wondered about the analogy. There are lots of “black holes” (buckets) and “drunken sailors” (big spending) but “broken”. I guess the only thing is that broken is bad – using broken as an adjective. All the commentary is about how bad the deficit is given the terms of trade are slowing and undermining tax revenue. While the deficit is way to low, it is good that we have one. It is good that America and Japan and the UK have deficits. There is at least some net spending flowing each day to support the economy. Anyway, time to look into the glorious gouging of the public purse that only the neo-liberals can make look as though it is financial responsibility at its best.

For those who don’t know about cricket, it is good to get a high score in each of the innings. Just like baseball. An innings score of 350 runs in Cricket would be respectable. So imagine the headlines – Big problem, team only scores 130 runs in final innings! The whole cricket world then gets itself in a lather about this with experts blabbing on national TV about only 130 runs. As an after thought, the news bulletin also announced – “and team pulls off a thrilling victory”. Imagine, some bean counter expert coming out in the middle of a game of football and telling the teams that the game is being called off because the budget for goals had been exhausted. The two points – context with respect to meaning and aims and where does the unit of account come from – have been sadly lost in the current economic debate. Even journalists who know better have done a great disservice to the Australian public today by choosing to present an uncritical version of a report that is at best incompetent but also much worse than that. This morning Australians have been bombarded via TV, radio and the printed media with economists, appearing seriously self-important but, at the end of it all, all they are doing is making stuff up and are probably too stupid to know otherwise.

Remember, earlier this year, when the IMF admitted they had made errors in their modelling of expenditure multipliers. They had been tramping into countries with their jackboots telling all and sundry that fiscal austerity would promote growth because their multiplier estimates told them so. Millions of job losses later, they came clean. It turns out that when they revised their multiplier estimates exactly the opposite was the case. Now they acknowledge that spending multipliers are in range of 1.5 1.75, meaning that increasing government spending adds at least 150 cents in the dollar spent extra to the economy. Now, the darlings of the austerity cultists – Rogoff and Reinhart – has been exposed for poor research standards – to wit, errors in spreadsheet coding. Meanwhile, Cyprus is being driven into oblivion. Who is ever going to take responsibility for these travesties?

The Australian government announced its new agenda for public education yesterday. It announced that it would spend an addition $A14.5 billion, overwhelmingly in the public schooling system, over the next six years. A major Report released last year showed that the last few decades of neo-liberal cuts to public education have undermined the quality of outcomes. Australia now trails behind nearly every advanced nation in this respect. The Report called for a massive injection of funds into the public schooling system. So we should applaud the Government announcement. The problem is that it thinks it still has a major fiscal problem (deficit currently around 3.2 per cent of GDP). As a consequence it thinks it has to cut spending elsewhere to fund the public school initiative. This is a wrong logic for two reasons. First, real GDP growth is falling and unemployment is rising fast which indicates that we need more aggregate demand not less (or the same). Second, it has chosen to get the cash to help restore the credibility of the public schooling system from the higher education system. Destroy the future to save it sort of logic. Another mindless demonstration of its fiscal ignorance.