I am travelling and engaged with commitments today and so am fitting this blog into a shorter time-span than I usually make. The floods in Australia have now become tragic (loss of many lives) but the Prime Minister still is insisting that the Federal government “will bring the budget to surplus in 2012-13, and, yes, that will entail some tough choices” even though it is being predicted that the impact on real growth of the Queensland economy virtually shutting down at present might be of the order of 1 per cent (see this account). Given the tepid economic growth that was revealed in the September quarter this would suggest that we are going back into recession territory. My advice to PM Julia in relation to her surplus aspirations – “automatic stabilisers – learn about them”. You can see the negative impact of the excessive rain over the last few months on coal exports already – see ABS data release yesterday for International Trade in Goods and Services. Anyway, I was thinking about this early today before I started attending to my commitments here (in Melbourne) and it related to something that I read in the New York Times this week. The issue is that so-called progressives often let the team down by using inappropriate constructs in the public debate. I am never absolutely sure whether they use these constructs because they don’t know better or they want some point of intersection with the mainstream debate. I usually conclude the former and there are times when you realise you know they don’t quite get it.