Surplus! [updated]

Yes, it’s time to say something nice about the Key Government and its Minister of Finance. And, no, it isn’t  April Fools Day.

This Budget Day, this week, if we take him at his word,  Finance Minister Bill English expects to unveil the promise of a small surplus – wafer thin, and next year rather than, but still a surplus nonetheless. (We hope.)

So let it be known that after five years in office, the Minister of Finance has finally balanced the damn budget. Or is about to.

The job of balancing the damn budget was bother harder and easier than you might expect. Harder, because the prevailing wisdom of the finance-ministers’ world is that in times of recession deficits are the way to go.  Easier, because this prevailing wisdom is mostly bollocks, and because government spending and borrowing less actually lowers the costs for businesses struggling to stay afloat.

So let’s give Billy Boy and his advisers credit for not only doing the job of producing a surplus, but of wanting to.

And for presenting a budget surplus to voters in election year instead of a scramble of lollies.

Now to pay off all that debt he’s accrued over the last five years …