Hey, big spenders!

"And so we go into the PREFU this afternoon, and [to] whatever spin the two parties’ spokespeople are going to put on fiscal prospects,with (a) a governing party that has already run up really big deficits, adding more fiscal expansion in their election year budget, with no specifics on how they might close those deficits (including in the face of ongoing cost pressures), and b) a main Opposition party which was seemed content to go along with Labour’s expansionary stance (just rearranging some of the tax and spending pieces), but in fact seems to have ended up with an even more expansionary stance themselves....
    "We have had 20 years in which New Zealand governments ran net debt as a share of GDP materially lower than the median OECD country. [But now with] the big Covid spending well behind us, both parties seem okay with debt still rising rapidly (they may say otherwise, but judge them not by the handwaving medium-term rhetoric but by their specific and immediate actions and commitments)."

~ Michael Reddell, from his post 'Previewing PREFU'