Hide on housing

Rodney Hide writes in NBR:

You gotta love politics.

Think of the care, the anguish, the endless calculations, the budgeting, the fear, the heartache that the average household endures before determining to build a house.

Politics dodges that.

You just announce it. No care. No anguish. No calculations. No budgeting.

And not one house. One hundred thousand houses.

It’s think bigger!

In business you would be dismissed as a quack and jailed for fraud. That’s why politics is so wonderful. It turns the world upside down.

Newspaper editorials have enthused over the policy.

These same editorials condemned finance companies for their recklessness.

The 100,000 house policy makes the finance companies appear paragons of transparency, analysis and proper budgeting.

I am amazed that no media outlet has tried to seriously analyse the numbers behind the policy.

The backers of the 100,000 houses policy don’t have to trouble themselves with a carefully worded prospectus that could land them in jail should the plan go pear-shaped. Nope.

They just have to announce it.

Politics has no need to attract investors. Inland Revenue works day in and day out fleecing citizens of their hard-earned cash precisely to fuel such grand projects, the very stuff and substance of politics.

Yep, the taxpayers are the ones who will for out $30 billion or so in the belief that the Government will be able to sell houses in Auckland for under $300,000 and only lose $15,000 on them.