KEY POINTS:
It is easy to see Michael Cullen as a tight-fisted guardian of the public purse.
Especially on days like yesterday when he was - yet again - reporting surpluses even fatter than expected but being coy about the prospect of personal tax cuts. Some of the numbers in the Crown books are hard to square with the fiscal skinflint image, however.
Government spending, which after all is the side of the accounts Dr Cullen and his Cabinet colleagues have most control over, rose 7 per cent in the 2006/07 year.
It was $3.5 billion higher than the year before and as a share of the economy it crept up from 31.9 per cent to 32.2 per cent.
Tax revenue, on the other hand, was only 1.2 per cent higher than in the previous year.
On the face of it that is a remarkably modest rise considering the economy grew 2.2 per cent over the year, with more jobs, higher wages, increased consumer spending and therefore more PAYE and GST for the Government.
The tax take from companies and the self-employed fell compared with the 2005/06 year, however, by $1.4 billion between them. That is mainly because the previous year business tax take was inflated by an extra quarter's worth of provisional tax, about $1.8 billion.
Even allowing for that, the increase in tax from the business sector, 2.9 per cent, was only about half the increase in PAYE from wage and salary earners.
It is a reminder that we are in a stage of the economic cycle when business profits are being squeezed but households have been largely insulated by a strong labour market and a strong housing market.
Even allowing for the one-off boost to the previous year's tax take, the Government's operating spending still grew faster than its tax revenue, 7 per cent versus 4.8 per cent. If these were a company's accounts the sight of those two lines converging would be a warning sign.
It is no comfort at all that Government spending in the year ended June turned out to be lower, by nearly $800 million, than forecast in the Budget that was delivered in May, only a few weeks before the end of the fiscal year.
Perhaps the Dickensian analogy should be the profligate Micawber, not Scrooge.
