Eating the pie, not growing it Henry Ergas: And even accepting the fog of unreality that is Labor's latest budget, those structural deficits will persist through to at least 2016-17... The contrast with Labor could not be more stark. The licence given to union thugs; the imposition of inefficient taxes, such as the carbon tax and the MRRT; the squandering of scarce capital on follies such as the NBN; the proliferation of subsidies, regulation and "green tape"; the resulting crippling of the resource boom: all these slash the economy's ability to grow and so finance spending commitments. The result is a deterioration in the structural fiscal position under Labor, which may be 2 per cent of GDP worse than the PBO suggests.