It just must be the case that some higher being has a sense of humour. Who would have thought we would have not one Dr Jim as Treasurer of Australia, but two? I might even start calling Jimbo, Dr Jim 2.0.

The parallels between the two Treasurer Dr Jim’s are uncanny.

Dr Jim Cairns, who admittedly was the treasurer for a short time before being sacked, was paired with a prime minister who didn’t know anything about economics but, more to the point, didn’t want to know anything. Let’s face it, Gough was concerned with the more esoteric aspects of governing, not the bread and butter of keeping the books.

When asked to deal with an economic issue, our present Prime Minister’s typical response is just ask Jim (or Katy). For Albo, everything is political; economics is of no interest to him unless it has a political dimension and he can wedge the opposition.

Just briefly, Dr Jim 1.0 was a real shocker. He didn’t actually hand down a budget but was pulling the strings of the likeable but weak Frank Crean, who was nominally the treasurer. When the Whitlam government came to office in 1972, government payments were running at 18.5 per cent of GDP, which incidentally looks laughably tiny by comparison with today.

When Gough’s Labor government was booted out of office in 1975, the proportion of government spending had risen to 21.7 per cent of GDP. In 1974-75, real government payments grew by 20 per cent; and they rose by a further 16 per cent the next year. This was a spend-a-thon of monumental proportions.

Now you might think I’m about to declare that Dr Jim 2.0 is a fiscal genius by comparison with his namesake. After all, he has managed to hand down two budgets showing surpluses. Mind you, these surpluses were not of his doing. They were the result of commodity prices being much higher than forecast and galloping income tax revenue because of bracket creep.

(Don’t you just love the term bracket creep? It sounds really scary, which it is. Fiscal drag is an alternative and that is nearly as good.)

But it takes a certain type of person – smug, entitled and ignorant are adjectives that spring to mind – to hand down a budget showing four deficits in a row, all of them substantial, which Dr Jim 2.0 managed to do last week. Over the forwards – econ speak for the four years ending in 2027-28 – cumulative deficits are expected to reach in excess of $122 billion.

In fact, it was just the Swanny 2012 budget in reverse. In that earlier budget, then Labor treasurer Wayne Swan announced four surpluses, which never came to pass, but what the heck. Dr Jim 2.0 was his chief-of-staff at the time.

This time around and simply reusing Swanny’s words, Dr Jim 2.0 could have started his budget speech by declaring ‘the four years of [deficits] I announce tonight are a powerful endorsement of the strength of our economy, resilience of our people, and success of our policies’.

But here’s the real point: Dr Jim 2.0 expressed no shame about this outcome, no remorse at the fact that payments will markedly exceed revenue. Net government debt goes from $500 billion this financial year to nearly $700 billion in 2027-28. I guess we are expected to assume that reinventing capitalism doesn’t come cheap and we should simply thank Jimbo.

Leaving aside the years of deficit spending to one side, the real revelation of this year’s budget was the discovery by Dr Jim 2.0 of a magic economic lamp. You know the one you rub and you get what you want. (I think I might order a few online, although they are probably made by Temu in China.)

The trick was to use $3.5 billion of taxpayers’ money to disperse $300 handouts to cover electricity bills for everyone – yes, even Twiggy, Clive and Andrew Charlton – and then claim that this would lower inflation by the end of the year. Indeed, it would lower inflation – OK, the recorded CPI – so much that the Reserve Bank would be in a position to lower the cash rate, flowing to lower mortgage rates.

This outcome requires a lot of rubbing of the lamp and repeating ‘abracadabra’ many times. But how good is it? You spend truckloads of taxpayer money to lower power bills and you get lower interest rates into the bargain.

But hang on, Dr Jim 2.0 obviously didn’t allow for the fact that his magic lamp might be on the blink. Subsidising energy bills is just a form of stimulus spending; it allows consumers to spend the savings on other things. It’s a point of universal agreement among economists – and that’s really saying something. Retail shares rebounded sharply during the budget week, which was telling us a lot.

And by the way, the Reserve Bank will be on to this ruse. The governor will look through this manipulation of the CPI by taking into account what is called the trimmed mean – another great term – which ignores outlying and extraneous factors. She will also be aware that these sorts of subsidies merely kick the can down the road and that the price pressures re-emerge when the subsidies are lifted.

There is one scenario in which the magic lamp might just do the trick: if the state of the economy is so weak, particularly if household consumption falls in a hole, that there is enough spare capacity in the economy to accommodate the extra government spending. But Dr Jim 2.0 might not like this outcome as the rate of unemployment may well shoot up in this case and consumers will be even grumpier than they are now.

The last thing Dr Jim 2.0 wants on his watch is a recession, commonly defined as two quarters of negative growth. It is one reason why he and the other lamp-rubbers in Treasury have so resisted reducing the migrant intake. A large inflow of migrants ensures that the absolute size of the economy increases even if the key per capita measures – per capita household disposable income, for instance – are heading for the South Pole, which they have been.

And while it may seem that Albo has ordered a cut to the migrant intake, it looks like mainly announcements rather than outcomes. The political vibe is much more important here. Do you really think a Labor government would take on the powerful vested interests gunning for large migrant intakes – universities and property developers, in particular? In any case, the net overseas migration – long-term arrivals minus long-term departures – is still expected to be around 400,000 this financial year, which is more than twice the long-term average.

Dr Jim 2.0 may have to think about asking for a refund on his magic lamp at the end of the year.

Economics has a brutal way of clashing with wishful thinking.