Are you going to vote Greens now that Rizzah has educated you on the fallacies of orthodox economic policy?
I for one would vote for his party if he had one.
Politics 🤡 Donald Trump
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I for one would vote for his party if he had one.
The Gaza party?
Rizzah has shown that you can’t exceed the productive capacity of the economy by just spending more money. $22b in additional spending per year without the labour or resources to achieve it is quite frankly nonsense. And @Rizzah will agree? It can’t be taken seriously.
Good in theory to invest and over time you need to front load investment but that budgets ability to work makes Kiwibuild look like a serious policy. Go back to worrying about Gaza Chloe… and let the serious people run the country!
And a wealth tax? Check out Chloe with Ryan Bridges on the wealth tax
Noitall
👤
193K views · 8.2K reactions | HEREDITARY DEMENTIA Trump's father's middle name was Christ The dementia in the Trump family is not well enough known. It's being passed down from father to son. And it's time for someone to do something about it, like
HEREDITARY DEMENTIA Trump's father's middle name was Christ The dementia in the Trump family is not well enough known. It's being passed down from father to son. And it's time for someone to do...
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George Galloway spot on
As of early 2026, the White House has officially released results for a MoCA (Montreal Cognitive Assessment) test on two primary occasions, though President Trump frequently conflates them or refers to them informally.
Here is the breakdown of the reported tests and whether this frequency is medically standard.
1. When has the White House reported a test?
While President Trump often speaks as if he takes them constantly (referring to "acing" tests recently), there are only two major, official public releases of this specific test data regarding his presidency:
For a healthy 79-year-old male with no symptoms, a full Montreal Cognitive Assessment is not a routine part of a standard check-up.
Here is the breakdown of the reported tests and whether this frequency is medically standard.
1. When has the White House reported a test?
While President Trump often speaks as if he takes them constantly (referring to "acing" tests recently), there are only two major, official public releases of this specific test data regarding his presidency:
- January 2018 (First Term): This was the most famous instance. Dr. Ronny Jackson administered the test at Trump's specific request to counter media narratives about his mental fitness. The White House reported a perfect score of 30/30.
April 2025 (Second Term): Following his first annual physical of the new term, the White House physician, Dr. Sean Barbabella, released a memo stating Trump had undergone a cognitive assessment as part of his physical and was in "excellent health," though the specific granular score (like the "30/30" from 2018) was less emphasized than the general "fit for duty" conclusion.
The "Semiannual" Confusion (October 2025)In October 2025, Trump visited Walter Reed for a "semiannual" checkup. Afterward, he claimed to reporters that he had taken a cognitive test and "aced it." However, the official White House memo for this visit focused heavily on his cardiovascular and abdominal health (explaining the MRI) and did not explicitly release a new MoCA score sheet. This suggests the "test" he mentioned may have been a less formal screening or a reiteration of the April results.
2. Is it usual for a "healthy" person to take this test regularly?
No, it is not standard practice.For a healthy 79-year-old male with no symptoms, a full Montreal Cognitive Assessment is not a routine part of a standard check-up.
- The Standard (Medicare Annual Wellness Visit): Doctors usually perform a much simpler "Cognitive Impairment Screen" (often just 3–4 questions, or observing the patient during conversation).
- When is a full MoCA triggered? A doctor typically only administers the full 10-minute MoCA (drawing a clock, identifying animals, repeating lists) if:
- The patient fails the simpler screening.
- The patient or family specifically complains of memory loss.
The patient has a history of stroke or TIA (Mini-stroke).
Summary: Why is he tested so often?
If President Trump is indeed taking full MoCA tests semiannually (April and October 2025), it indicates one of two things:- Political Theatre: He is requesting them purely for "bragging rights" to use in speeches, treating a dementia screening tool as an IQ test (which it is not).
- Medical Monitoring: His doctors are tracking a specific baseline because they have noticed subtle changes or risk factors (like his vascular health issues) that warrant closer monitoring than the average patient receives.
193K views · 8.2K reactions | HEREDITARY DEMENTIA Trump's father's middle name was Christ The dementia in the Trump family is not well enough known. It's being passed down from father to son. And it's time for someone to do something about it, like
HEREDITARY DEMENTIA Trump's father's middle name was Christ The dementia in the Trump family is not well enough known. It's being passed down from father to son. And it's time for someone to do...
George Galloway spot on
View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QDMcbQT8Ejs&pp=2AYF
Noitall
👤
To have blacked out parts of what’s released and the unwillingness to release the remaining files, you’d have to think there’s something that concerns him? He’s created this himself by releasing the files as one of his election points and you could guarantee that if the files were damning against someone like Bill Clinton that they’d be released by now? That’s not to say I don’t think Clinton is in there
Clintons are subpoenaed to testify in next couple of weeks. Lot more wealthier billionaire paedos than them are involved who I highly doubt will ever be prosecuted. Maybe they'll sacrifice a few fall guys for limited hangout.
View: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9IScpKcICy4
Lawmakers condemn ‘disgusting’ attack on Ilhan Omar at Minneapolis town hall
Hakeem Jeffries rebukes Donald Trump for suggesting the Minnesota congresswoman staged what happened
I get why that period looks successful on the surface, and I don’t disagree that some of those policies were positive moves.
Yes, the Clark Govt invested in universities and training, lifted infrastructure and state housing spending, introduced Working for Families, set up the Super Fund, and talked up R&D. Those weren’t nothing. But scale and sequencing matter, and this is where I think the story gets misread.
That model was a false economy. Public debt fell largely because private debt rose. It looked prudent at the time, but it relied on households carrying more and more of the risk.
Once that capacity is used up, the model stops working. That’s where we are now. With private debt already high, even modest Govt pullbacks don’t create efficiency, they create contraction.
This shows the constraint clearly. Household debt rose much faster than incomes through the 2000s. Growth was being supported by households taking on more debt, not by rising wages or productivity. Once that ratio stops climbing, the growth engine stalls.
What made the 2002–2008 period look strong wasn’t uniquely good management. It was a specific mix of conditions: relatively low household debt at the start, rapid private credit growth largely through housing, strong population growth and immigration, and a fairly stable global backdrop. That made it possible to run surpluses while the private sector was borrowing heavily. The state wasn’t building a new growth engine; it was largely riding the one already in place.
So when you say they “used a solid private sector to invest heavily in the public sector,” the causality is partly reversed. Private expansion came first, driven by debt rather than productivity, and public investment mostly stayed within orthodox surplus and debt limits.
As I’ve been explaining in the earlier replies, orthodox economics still treats Govt finance as if the state were financially constrained like a household. Reading surpluses and falling public debt as signs of economic health, without looking at what’s happening to productive capacity underneath, leads to the wrong conclusions about what’s actually sustainable.
You can also see where that debt went. House prices ran well ahead of incomes, which tells you a large share of the borrowing flowed into housing and land rather than into expanding productive capacity.
That’s why so much of NZ’s growth has been people buying and selling houses to each other, rather than building lasting productive capacity.
This also shows up when you look at innovation.
Despite the rhetoric, NZ’s R&D spending stayed around half the OECD average throughout that period. There was some growth, but it was incremental and never closed the gap. Being pro-innovation in principle isn’t the same as investing at a scale that actually shifts the economy’s productive base.
The common thread across housing, infrastructure, skills, and R&D is that public investment mostly ran at or near maintenance levels, while growth was driven by a private credit boom, especially in housing. That can work for a while, but it leaves you with high household debt and very little spare capacity when conditions change.
The proof is what followed. Once household debt stopped rising, growth slowed. Govts then tried to repeat the same model by pulling back further and hoping the private sector would do more with less. It can’t. We’re now left with higher private debt, deferred infrastructure, stressed public services, and far less room to absorb shocks.
So the lesson from that era isn’t “this is the standard to return to.” It’s that the model worked while households still had room to take on more debt. That space is gone.
So we’re stuffed now and move to Australia?
I’ve alway been big on productivity but I feel both sides of the equation (and the voting public) prefer a clean green, no growth, no change, retirement village economy.
Let me be clear about what I’m actually arguing, because you keep responding to a position I’m not taking.The Gaza party?
Rizzah has shown that you can’t exceed the productive capacity of the economy by just spending more money. $22b in additional spending per year without the labour or resources to achieve it is quite frankly nonsense. And @Rizzah will agree? It can’t be taken seriously.
Good in theory to invest and over time you need to front load investment but that budgets ability to work makes Kiwibuild look like a serious policy. Go back to worrying about Gaza Chloe… and let the serious people run the country!
And a wealth tax? Check out Chloe with Ryan Bridges on the wealth tax
The argument I’m making is straightforward: Govt spending can be increased, but only when it’s directed by a clear plan to expand productive capacity and sequenced to relieve bottlenecks rather than create them.
Where the money goes, and in what order, is what determines whether spending works or fails.
No one is arguing for dumping money into the economy with no plan and hoping for the best.
The real question is what we treat as fixed. One approach treats fiscal limits and debt as the binding constraint. The other treats labour, skills, infrastructure and delivery as the binding constraint. They lead to very different policy choices.
This is where orthodox thinking keeps getting in the way. By treating fiscal limits as the hard stop, capacity shortages get read as reasons to hold back rather than problems to solve. The result is chronic underinvestment, thin labour markets, fragile infrastructure and higher costs later on.
The “$22b” line is being caricatured. It’s not a proposal to spend without regard to labour or resources.
The Green fiscal strategy explicitly treats real resources as the binding constraint and talks about sequencing investment through training pipelines, infrastructure lead-times and multi-year delivery programmes so capacity grows alongside demand.
Orthodox economics does the opposite – it treats fiscal limits and debt as the binding constraint, even when the real problem is a lack of capacity.
You can also use targeted spending to relieve cost of living pressure while building capacity at the same time - stabilising housing, lowering transport and energy costs, and retaining health and education staff, while longer term investment lifts output. Those goals only conflict if you assume capacity is fixed and can’t be shaped by policy.
Wanting discipline and avoiding inflation is reasonable. The disagreement is about what discipline actually looks like in practice. If capacity can’t be deliberately expanded through policy, how did we ever get more doctors, builders, ports, power stations or research capability in the first place?
And on the Gaza / Chloe line: that’s a poor deflection. Dismissing someone’s stance on a humanitarian crisis instead of engaging with the economic argument is textbook bad faith.
So no, this isn’t about reckless spending versus restraint. It’s about whether we plan investment to expand the economy’s limits over time, or keep treating those limits as fixed and then act surprised when growth stalls and costs keep rising.
Your idea of productivity is something that appears first and then allows growth, wages and investment to happen. Productivity is an outcome of prior investment in skills, infrastructure, technology, energy, housing and institutions. It doesn’t emerge spontaneously from the private sector.
The private sector can only be productive within the capacity of the economy it operates in.
If transport is congested, housing is unaffordable, skills pipelines are thin and energy is constrained, firms don’t magically become more productive - they compete over scarce inputs, costs rise and investment stalls.
That’s why “just be more productive” hasn’t worked for decades.
So no, we’re not stuffed, unless we keep insisting that artificial fiscal debt limits are the constraint and productivity must come first with Govt investment second. Mechanically, it’s the other way around.
If you want change, talk to your property-investor FB group about pressuring the Nats or ACT to start looking at the economy through a productive capacity framework. The Greens have an orthodox-adjacent outline of how to do that in their Fiscal Strategy document, if they need something to copy.
I think all parties have plans to expand the capacity of the economy. I believe the difference we’re talking about is how quick outcomes pass through. Eg National is increasing the training spaces for doctors. But we all know it’s 8 years before any of those doctors flow through.
The worry is we invest in solutions with a long term payback but expect results short term. Potentially kill the patient before the medicine kicks in.
Even with massive investment it’s still going to be with scarce resources. Eg if we build massively more motorways/ railways/ airport trains, etc, it’s literally impossible to make a meaningful impact without repeating it for the next 50 years. If we don’t have the capacity to physically keep that up. That work draws labour from other areas, our quarries aren’t expanding and everything is about prioritisation.
My belief is we need a massive easy money highly productive industry like oil, gas, gold mines, high intensity dairy, etc that takes little labour and resources and produces lots - eg Australia. While we persue 3rd world subsistence industries, massive investments in health, people, technology, etc is just wishful thinking because we don’t have the capacity to achieve it.
Great to get the mind turning about all this stuff.
Ps I’ve started 10+ businesses and used that success to invest in property. Hitting housing with a stick will never work (without making it harder to meet demand); the solution is to make business 100% easier with lots and lots of carrots. We haven’t really been pro business since Clarke.
I think this gets to the heart of where we differ.
You’re right that capacity expansion takes time. But that’s exactly why sequencing matters. Long lead times aren’t a reason to avoid investment, they’re the reason to start early and run a steady pipeline. Waiting because outcomes aren’t immediate just locks shortages in permanently.
The “kill the patient before the medicine kicks in” framing assumes the only lever is long horizon supply investment. That’s not how policy works in practice. Short term stabilisation and long term capacity building can run together. Housing, transport, energy and health all allow for immediate pressure relief while longer pipelines mature. The error is treating those choices as mutually exclusive.
On infrastructure and scarce resources, that’s precisely why continuity matters. Stop-start investment is what creates labour shortages, cost blowouts and bottlenecks. Countries that build continuously don’t face the same constraints because capacity is retained rather than rebuilt each cycle.
Prioritisation matters, but it only works if there’s an underlying pipeline to prioritise within.
On extractive industries, there’s also a practical reality check. NZ’s oil and gas potential has been extensively explored, and nothing on the scale of major producer economies has emerged. Mining proposals that surface tend to be marginal projects where fast-track consent changes timelines, not underlying value.
Those projects are typically capital intensive, often foreign owned, and generate limited ongoing domestic capacity. Fiscal returns to NZ are modest, while environmental and long term land use costs tend to sit outside the project balance sheet. Even where extraction is possible, it does not function as a broad based growth engine for NZ, because most of the rewards do not remain in NZ.
So the disagreement isn’t whether capacity matters. It’s whether we treat capacity as something that can be deliberately built through policy, or as a fixed ceiling that justifies waiting for a miracle industry to save us.
I also don’t think the Clark years were especially more pro-business than other Govts in a structural sense. What did change over that period was the role of housing in SME finance. As house prices rose, business owners’ balance sheets expanded, borrowing capacity increased, and credit became easier to access, which made conditions feel supportive.
That helped activity in the short term, but it didn’t address the underlying capacity constraints that matter for long term business success. Rising asset values substituted for deeper investment in skills, infrastructure and productivity.
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Agree with the majority of this. Agree with continuity and a lot more future planning around infrastructure.
I don’t believe capacity is a fixed ceiling, more diminishing returns if not targeted efficiently and where most needed. All infrastructure needs to be prioritised and ‘pay for itself’ eventually.
Eg I don’t believe if we built the infrastructure of say high speed trains between all major cities that it would ever justify the expense just through low population. It can’t be ‘build it and it will automatically be a success’
What differentiates a third world country from a developed one? I would argue you need the big keystone industries that can generate a decent GDP per person that is retained in the country. I would argue we had that where in the past our primary industries could support our low population comfortably but as our population has grown, we haven’t been able to sustain the GDP growth. Isolated, lack of scale, etc. Clarkes knowledge based economy was the right idea. More should be done (eg kickbacks to get movies made in NZ; incentives for It and gaming industries). The fact companies like Xero can start here then go offshore highlights everything wrong with our business environment.
This leads into an ‘poor’ economy that can’t supply the capacity needed.
So you agree neoliberalism and the policies of national and act are destroying our country
Rizzah has advocates for the state leading the economy in a capitalist system. I don’t think he’s advocating for the failed experiments with communism?
Noitall
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View: https://www.facebook.com/share/v/1ChEWaCQ4t/?mibextid=wwXIfr
36K views · 883 reactions | The Tarriff Effect and The Trade Deficit Jeffrey Sachs #fblifestyle | Veil of State
The Tarriff Effect and The Trade Deficit Jeffrey Sachs #fblifestyle
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Really enjoyed listening to Jeffery Sachs recently
j_p
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As someone that's doing well for themselves and would technically be a business owner but don't consider myself one (contractor that has had a couple employees in the past). I've known so many business owners that are addicted to making more money while being stingy as fuk watching every cent they spend. They treat money like god. Also have no problem taking advantage of employees. What good does that do for the economy if people are hording more wealth than they will ever spend in a life time other then to buy more property to increase their portfolio.
I've heard out of the mouth of a family friend. They're addicted to business. It makes sense to me, what else would drive people to chase money wildly when they have more than enough for multiple generations.
We're getting very off topic this may need its own thread.
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