Thousands on the dole leads to one thing: recession

Thousands on the dole leads to one thing: recession - National - smh.com.au:

RECESSION haunts NSW as it struggles with the rise and fall in Sydney property prices.

Debt-laden households, confronted with property prices going down, have been cautious in their spending for some time. This is taking a toll on jobs.

NSW's jobs figures add to a litany of poor economic indicators. The state has had fewer building approvals in December than Victoria, Queensland and even Western Australia. Its small businesses are the nation's most pessimistic and are demanding lower taxes and less red tape. The state's share of the national economy is down from 36 per cent in 2000 to 34.3 per cent in 2004-05 - the lowest state ratio records began in 1989-90.

ANZ's chief economist, Saul Eslake, said the Premier, Morris Iemma, had a huge job ahead of him to clean up after Mr Carr, whose lack of interest in economic policy was "rather redolent of Whitlam".

Mr Eslake said the state economy would take five years to recover from Mr Carr's legacy, which included the ill-timed vendor tax, a misconceived desalination plant, infrastructure neglect and discouragement of population and economic growth.

The bigger the empty housing boom, the harder the recession. I doubt whether the NSW Labor government has a single practical economist amongst them. These idiots presided over 12 years of uncontrolled housing boom, and are now facing a jobs downturn from the fact that no-one has any discretionary money left to spend on the retail and wholesale sectors. It's all gone into empty inflation in passive bricks and mortar. Hope NSW Labor are pleased with themselves, given that the Labor right gave up representing the interests of 'labour' years ago.

Talk about an 'ill-timed vendor tax' - if they had put it in 10 years earlier, they would have had a chance at forestalling the empty housing boom, which is causing so much distress, and now causing a recession, mass unemployment, and mass migration away from the city of Sydney. Of course, such a tax is only going to be offsetting the generous Federal tax giveaways of reduced capital gains tax and negative gearing allowances on investment property that helped stimulate the bubble and offered generous terms to the average punter to speculate wildly in property at the taxpayers expense.

Sack them all and start again with a people's government. If they're not just incompetent, then they must be downright malicious. Either way, you don't want these clowns running the state or the country.