What is the Government Budget?

On Thursday the 25th of May the Government will deliver our annual budget.

Yes, that’s right. Just like your family, your school and hopefully you with any money you might have – the Government has a budget to account for all income we receive and money we will spend in any given year.

Every dollar that the Government spends is a dollar that we have taken from hard working Kiwi households and our budget makes us accountable to those whose tax dollars we are spending. It also offers the Government an opportunity to highlight our priorities moving forward whether that be health, education, policing .

In 2016 we budgeted to have $31,205,000,000 income. We used this money to fund things like your school that educates you, the roads we drive on, rail networks that transport our goods around the country, and the hospitals that care for us when we are sick.

This year we are expecting that we will end up with around $700 million surplus. This means we have brought in more revenue than we had expected, or spent less. If we had brought in less money than we expected or spent more this would likely have delivered a deficit.

I would highly encourage any young person with an interest in our Government to watch closely on budget day to try and see how it all works. I’ll be back writing in two weeks to break down just what we spent our money on in an easy to understand way.