I Pledge You My Froth

The Herald today has this cute little graphic claiming that National is now out-pledging Labour.

“ It was a relatively quiet campaign week in terms of spending promises, with Labour deciding to largely pull the plug on pledges other than infrastructure-related ones.”

This would have been nice if it was true. Unfortunately, all it really appears to mean is that Labour is now releasing policy without costing it. The Herald should have picked up on this because it goes on to detail a whole lot of spending that National is doing on health. Yet the Labour health policy has virtually no dollar figures attached to it.

Without dollar figures, a policy is just so much vague feel-good froth. Worse, should Labour attempt to fulfill their promises, they will almost certainly either have to extend the tax take or increase the already terrifying proposed deficit.

[SARC ON] Of course, I wouldn’t expect the media to pick up on anything so mundane as uncosted policy. {SARC OFF]

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