Nonsense statistics

I’m annoyed with this article in the Press, repeating some invented figures by Cullen, trying to guess what National’ tax relief and extra spending may total.

They claims it may be $7.5 billion. Yet do not specify whether this is per year, over three years or ten years. The article is meaningless due to this failure alone.

They invent a figure of 3% reduction in all four tax rates. They also assume it would all happen in the first year. They include in backdating income threshold adjustments to 1999 *on top of* tax rate reductions.

They have $2.1 in petrol tax into roads over six years, and cost $1 billion for seven new prisons (as if they would all be need in a couple of years which is crap). They also have $720 million to abolish carbon tax over three years.

So we have figures expressed as annual, as over three years, six years and over a decade, all together in the same article. This is just, to be blunt, shoddy. You can’t even refute it, because you can’t understand the basis for their claims.

If they showed all their calculations as average annual cost over the first three years, then maybe one could debate it.

As for the overall claims, that is simply scare mongering. Don Brash is probably the most fiscally responsible MP in Parliament. He’d sooner spend twelve weeks on Survivor or Treasure Island, than run a Government which has an operating deficit.

Labour is desperate to panic National into showing its hand too early. Over the next four weeks they will make wilder and wilder claims about what National is promising. They will claim $10, $15, $20 billion of tax relief and spending. They will claim interest rates will double. In fact they will probably claim the sky will fall in also.