AND now we are back there again BUDGET 2017 Can it surpass the silliness of 2016?

Budget 2016: turning silliness dial up to 11

THE AUSTRALIAN MAY 6, 2016 12:00AM  by Adam Creighton Economics correspondent

The Australian has trawled the budget to find the 11 silliest measures, and you won’t believe number 7. The egregious 11, which cost taxpayers about $152 million over four years, could be scrapped without a scintilla of damage to the economy, or even society.

You might be on top of the major decisions in Scott Morrison’s first budget — changes to company, personal tax and superannuation, for instance. Maybe you know a little about the optimistic fiscal and economic projections or the elusive quest for a surplus in 2021. But it’s unlikely you’re across the full suite of government interventions that affect revenue and expenses.

Indeed, no one, realistically, ever can be. Every federal budget lists the literally hundreds of decisions the government has made since the previous budget update six months ago. A little over 260 decisions were made since December, across all the government departments. Governments are inveterate micromanagers.

It is on the smaller items that the rubber of Milton Friedman’s famous quip about the wastefulness of spending other people’s money on other people really hits the road. The smaller the cost of a budget measure, the sillier and more wasteful it is likely to be. Journalists naturally focus on the bigger-spending items. The sheer number and complexity of measures — and the fact that they are all released on the same day — defies scrutiny.

 Here are 11 of the best this time around, in no particular order.

1.$90m for “Exploring Being My Own Boss” workshops to encourage young people to start businesses. The workshops include “Self-Employment Starter Packs” (capped at 8600) designed to “raise awareness” of government subsidies. The federal department of employment will also dispatch “Inclusive Entrepreneurship Facilitators” in areas of high youth unemployment to introduce “local mentors” with budding entrepreneurs.

2.$4m to extend Keys2Drive, a program that provides free driving lessons for “participating learners”.

3.$2.4m to build “Landing Pads” in the “global innovation hot spots” of Singapore and Berlin to help Australian companies compete.

4.$5m to lift the number of political staff independent senators can employ from two to three (this comes on top of the four electorate staff they already have). Australia has the most and highest-paid political staffers in the world. We don’t need more.

5.$2m over two years “to consider” whether to sell Australian Hearing, a government provider of hearing services. The Commission of Audit considered this, and recommended almost two years ago to sell it. The government should just sell it.

6.$11m to “strengthen” newly arrived migrants’ “sense of belonging to Australian society”.

7.$6m for preschoolers from low socio-economic backgrounds to study foreign languages. Specifically, the money would entail $500 grants to preschools to subsidise “play-based learning through mobile devices”. Given the well documented fall in literacy and numeracy standards from primary school to university, teaching toddlers English first should be a priority.

8.An extra $20m to plant 20 million trees to “re-establish green corridors and urban forests”. Couldn’t local or state governments do this?

9.$1m for the Office of the Children’s eSafety Commissioner (who earns $340,000 a year) to “develop and distribute online resources promoting digital resilience”. Not ensuring, just promoting.

10.$10m so the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (which has clearly already been doing an excellent job) “to build additional capacity to investigate and respond to developments in the higher education sector”.

11.$800,000 to develop websites that provide information for women who are experiencing peri-natal depression. If this is really a serious national problem, I don’t think $800,000 is going to fix it.

Budget paper number 2, where all the decisions are itemised, is a treasure trove of meaningless expressions and bureaucratic language.

In his budget speech Morrison promised to prune “unnecessary waste”. These 11 items are surely in that category — not just wasteful, but unnecessarily so. Many of them are likely to be unconstitutional, but no one has bothered to challenge them. Under what head of power does the government provide driving lessons, or teach toddlers foreign languages? Most of the measures are a blatant encroachment on state responsibilities, further blurring the lines of responsibilities and between the levels of government.

While their cost is collectively a drop in the ocean for a budget that spends about $400 billion every year, the principle still matters. They reflect a blithe disregard for taxpayers’ money. One should always ask whether the marginal benefit of a particular government program exceeds the marginal cost — or loss of utility — to the taxpayers funding them. These aren’t necessarily rich taxpayers, either, but workers on lower incomes who are, in effect, being compelled to fund driving lessons and entrepreneurship starter packs for others.

The government could and should do more to cut spending. These 11 measures are just the tip of a federal waste iceberg.