Cycle of money
Alex Millmow (Swan's budget leaves no ace up Government's sleeve,'' May 18, p9) is having a dollar each way. Suggesting government spending is a gamble ignores the fact that not to spend could well cost more.
At the peak of the Great Depression almost one in three of the workforce was unemployed. The cost of anything approaching those figures today would amount to far more than the cost of the stimulus and infrastructure packages.
Money circulating does not evaporate. A goodly proportion comes back to the Treasury coffers in the form of GST, income tax and lower welfare payments.
Howard Carew, Isaacs
Iraq and the deficit
Now that the federal budget deficit has become a political football, I am wondering if there would be a deficit at all had not the Howard government involved Australia in the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts.
The billions of dollars that these ventures have soaked up so far are probably a lot more than the forecast deficit and the expenditure in dollars and lives has not had any positive effect for this country.
When one takes on feudalistic types of societies who have billions upon billions of dollars from oil and drug revenues, our troops are in a no-win situation and will be for as long as we are involved.
One cannot impose democracy on other nations through the barrel of a gun. I was involved in fighting terrorists on the south Arabian peninsula over 40 years ago which achieved nothing, changed nothing, and democracy did not prevail.
At least the British prime minister of the day, Harold Wilson, had the political nous to pull us out; just as the current British Prime Minister pulled British forces out of Iraq a few weeks ago. If Australia did the same and pulled out now, the deficit would quickly disappear.
Paul Parritt, Ngunnawal Support teachers
Every union and unionist should support public teachers in their just campaign for real wage increases and against cuts in service. If the teachers can smash this ''left'' Labor pay cap then we all benefit. So important is their campaign for improved living standards and more teachers that I believe, if teachers strike, every other union with members employed by the ACT Government should join them.
And we should join together in a mass meeting to decide on more action until we defeat Gallagher's grab and the Greens' complicity in it.
We didn't cause their crisis. We shouldn't pay for it. Let's strike for more jobs and better pay.
John Passant, Kambah
Mangled English
Well said, Ken Fowler (Letters, May 15), but I fear the issue you raise of the correct usage of less and fewer is but the tip of the iceberg.
How I would love to see the return of the widespread usage of the subjunctive mood, the elimination of the errant apostrophe, the eradication of comfort words such as the death-related euphemisms (fallen, passed away, lost, instead of killed, dead, died), the correct usage of certain verbs (lie instead of lay) and parts of verbs (past tense did instead of past participle done) and so on.
However, our language is dynamic and will change, even though it is changing because it is being bastardised by the ignorant. But don't blame the wretched souls who commit these transgressions, for they know not what they do.
No, blame our education policymakers who have decreed that the important thing is not grammar, but an understanding of the message being conveyed and, in the case of fewer and less, we all understand the message being conveyed.
Until our education system acknowledges that the correct usage of our language is a thing of beauty to behold and be taught, I'm afraid that Fowler will continue flogging the proverbial dead horse, as will I.
Graham Bridge, Nicholls
Decline explained
Michael Sage (Letters, May 15) asks how global temperatures fell between 1940 and 1970 when CO2 levels were rising. He should buy the book Global Warming The Complete Briefing, by John Houghton FRS, former professor of atmospheric physics at Oxford.
Houghton explains the fall as due to three factors temporarily (which can be decades with climate) mitigating anthropogenic temperature rise: lessening of solar radiation, more volcanic activity, and a rise in sulphate aerosols from anthropogenic air pollution. As atmospheric physics would indicate, these three factors added together were able to mitigate for a time the warming effect, weaker at that time than now, of human-caused greenhouse gases.
Actual evidence of this is the fact that climate models that incorporate these effects show a very good fit to real observed global temperatures over the past 150 years. The models thus provide a good guide to likely future trends (though not to random shorter-term variations present in most systems).
Global warming is not a risk worth considering it's a threatening probability requiring action now.
Paul Pollard, O'Connor
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