SINGAPORE : Household income from work fell in real terms across all income groups in Singapore last year.  This is according to figures released by the Department of Statistics on ‘Key Household Income Trends, 2009′.  Findings indicate that Singapore’s bottom 10 per cent was the hardest hit.  2009 was a rough year for all. Each member of the poorest group of households got a monthly income of S$334, down from S$340 in 2008.

Source: CNA

The fall across the various income groups is accounted for by the weak labour market conditions last year, which saw higher unemployment rates and lower wages. This also led to an increase in the number of persons not working in a household.  

Singaporeans are still recovering from a tough year, made tougher by fee hikes in ITE and Poly fees kicking in on 1 April.  Tuition fees were last raised in 2006.  Republic Polytechnic principal Yeo Li Pheow said: ‘The Government decided to keep fees at the status quo last year because of the economic recession but this year, as the economy turns, it is timely to raise the fees.

Clearly, the government continues to be slow to lower but quick to raise fees.  I wonder what is the proportion of ITE students that come from lower income families.  While the hikes are lower compared to PRs, it’s still a burden for our less well-off families.  Such is the compassion of the PAP government.  Or lack thereof.

 

From a reader. 

Dear Singaporeans,

As Singaporeans lament rising flat prices, he said they ought to understand that the Government sells them at a subsidised price, below market rate, so that they can own an asset that will appreciate in value over the years.

It adds to their wealth and this is an asset-enhancing policy Mr Lee believes citizens should not find fault with.

If they do, they must be ‘daft’, he said, at a dialogue during a housing conference as part of a series of events to mark the Housing and Development Board’s 50th anniversary.

And if National Development Minister Mah Bow Tan is unable to defend this policy, ‘he deserves to lose’ at the next general election, he quipped, to laughter from the participants, including a chuckling Mr Mah.

But if Mr Mah loses to the opposition, he warned that Singaporeans better sell their flats fast as they would no longer be of any value.

 

Lee Kuan Yew is at it trying to cheat you again with these nice sweetie words: subsidised price, below market rate, an asset that will appreciate in value over the years.  Mr Liar, Lee Kuan Yew, please produce some statistics.

1) What is the selling price of new flats sold during the period 1994 to 1999? (Use this 5-year period only for discussion.)

2) What is the current valuation price of these flats now?

3) Please explain why there is a big drop in the current valuation price compared to the selling price?

4) Will the big drop in value explain these sweetie words: subsidized price, below market rate and appreciating asset?

5) You can go on to churn out false statistics. However, the owners of these flats know you have cheated them several hundreds of thousands dollars from the higher over-price flats.

SINGAPORE scores highly in areas like infrastructure and stability, but fares poorly in culture and living environment indices. As a result, it was ranked the 53rd most liveable city in the annual survey by the The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), which compared 140 cities worldwide. Vancouver again topped the list, followed by Vienna and Melbourne in Australia. Three other Australian cities also made it to the top 10 list – Sydney, Perth and Adelaide.

Source: ST

The Republic scored better than culture capitals New York and London, which lost out because of crumbling infrastructure, but lagged behind other Asian capitals like Hong Kong, Tokyo and Osaka. I guess Singapore’s low ranking in culture could be attributed to our lack of history (and on-going difficulties in establishing a common national identity, exacerbated by a continual influx of foreigners to the mix).

Anyway, the top 10 ranking cities are as follow:

1. Vancouver, Canada

2. Vienna, Austria

3. Melbourne, Australia

4. Toronto, Canada

5. Calgary, Canada

6. Helsinki, Finland

7. Sydney, Australia

8. Perth, Australia

9. Adelaide, Australia

10. Auckland, New Zealand

Wishing all Singaporeans a happy and prosperous Tiger year!

A letter from a reader.

Lee Hsien Loong, you are as good a sweet talker and big time liar as your father.

If you have priced the flats correctly, you do not need to hand out a housing subsidy. Why don’t you price a 4-room flats at S1 million and then tell the young couple that you are giving him a big subsidy of S$700,000 assuming the final price the couple paid is $300,000?

Affordable? What do you mean by affordable?

Extending a housing loan that takes the young couple 30 years to pay is called affordable. You are locking this poor young couple to work as a slave to you for their next 30 years. In my opinion, a reasonable loan period should not exceed 20 years. Of course, the longer the loan period, the HDB flats that HDB sells can fetch a much, much higher price, period. You are robbing the people of their money and turning them into your slaves for 30 years. Please do not argue over this point. Just admit it. Your father started the GREAT HDB upgrading program and you are continuing his legacy of robbing the people of Singapore.

Now you said the government does not control the resale flats. Why? During the great upgrading period from 1990 and 2000, what did the HDB appointed surveyors did to jack up the price of the resale price to make the spiraling rise in the new flats price looks so much more attractive. Of course, now you don’t care about the resale price level because of two reasons.

1) You have over-priced the new flats when they were first sold.

2) Do you care about returning the drop in valuation of the resale flats because you had over=price the same flat when it was first sold to the poor owner who now is the sucker for the dropped in price of about $100,000. Btw, the new flats were sold bare, each owners had to dump in S$60,000 to S$120,000 to renovate the flat before moving in. That means, the poor owner who is selling his flats lost almost S$200,000.

Father and son are both great liars of the 20/21centuries and are utterly irresponsible.

Jan 26, 2010, New flats stay affordable By Jeremy Au Yong, The Straits Times online edition.

WHILE the Government will keep the prices of new Housing Board (HDB) flats in check, it has less control over prices in the resale market.

This state of affairs was highlighted by Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Tuesday night when he commented for the first time on what has been one of the hottest topics of discussion.

Speaking at a gala dinner to mark the HDB’s 50th anniversary, Mr Lee stressed the Government was committed to keeping HDB flats affordable and that its new flats are priced within the means of the vast majority of Singaporeans.

On top of that, it would also build enough new flats to cater to demand as the population grows. In fact, to cap its 50th year, the HDB will build its 1 millionth flat this year.

However, the Government does not have control over the prices of resale flats, he said.

His explanation: ‘These resale prices are set by individual households who transact flats on a willing buyer, willing seller basis, and are affected by movements and sentiments in the wider economy, including the private property market. Hence, resale prices of HDB flats will fluctuate from year-to-year.’

Contributed by a reader.

 Mr Khaw Boon Wan, please do become a big time liar like the father and son.

Subsidies for mammogram?

Do you dare to take up this challenge? I bet my life and you bet your life on this computation.

Just get an auditor to do a computation on how much profit or loss, this mammogram exercise is bringing in to the coffer of the Health ministry.

1) How much does a mammogram equipment cost? Depreciate it over 5 years or ten years depending on it reliability.

2) Add on the cost of labor. Send in an industrial Engineer to help them to be as productive as possible.

3) Compute the about to get the cost of production per the 5 minute it takes to conduct a mammogram.

4) At S$50 per scan, do you still think it is subsided?

Please do not hang out sweetie words like health-care subsidy anymore. There is no such thing as health-care subsidy when everyone in Singapore knows that the medical cost has been rising spirally over the past two decades. Your ministry has been making big fat profit from the provision of health-care service. If not, how do you account for the 3% of government expenditure on health-care versus the world average of 6%?

Jan 24, 2010:

HEALTH Minister Khaw Boon Wan said on Sunday that he was ’sympathetic’ towards the need for women to have mammograms, but said he was concerned about people depleting their Medisave accounts too quickly.

Speaking after house visits where he helped distribute food hampers to 260 households in a rental block in Marsiling, he said: ‘Don’t forget, Medisave was for hospitalisation. It is for sick people – in fact, very sick people, who have bills of around $2,000.’

He was responding to an appeal from Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office Lim Hwee Hua to let women use Medi-save to pay for breast cancer screenings.

Mrs Lim said on Saturday that helping women aged 50 to 69 form a habit of screening for breast cancer every two years is a current priority of the community arm of women PAP MPs, known as Women Inspiring, Nurturing, Grooming Singaporeans (Wings).

Mr Khaw said that his rule of thumb was that anything less than $100 should be paid out of one’s cash savings. He added that current subsidies for mammograms bring their cost as low as $50 for women over 40, and $25 for those who have not gone for checks in the past three years.

His worry: That people in their 50s may use their Medisave money on smaller expenses, not anticipating what could befall them in the future.

The man nominated to be the next United States Ambassador to Singapore has said that he would use ‘public diplomacy’ to promote greater press and political freedom in Singapore. Speaking at his nomination hearing on Tuesday, Ambassador-designate David Adelman, 45, said that these were the areas in which ‘Singapore needs the most improvement if it were to live up to the ambitions Americans have for democracy’.

Mr Adelman, a lawyer and Georgia state senator, made the remarks in response to a question from Virginia Senator Jim Webb, who asked if the US should engage Singapore in areas like democracy and press freedom.  ‘Make no mistake, currently Singapore is not a multi-party democracy,’ said Mr Adelman.  ‘And I intend, if confirmed, to use public diplomacy to work towards greater press freedoms, greater freedom of assembly and ultimately more political space for opposition parties in Singapore to strengthen Singapore into a multi-party democracy.’

Reform Party chief Kenneth Jeyaretnam welcomed a vow by David Adelman, President Barack Obama’s pick as Singapore envoy, to encourage the government to allow greater openness.  “The Reform Party welcomes the ambassador’s statement that he will use public diplomacy to work towards a genuine multi-party democracy in Singapore,” Jeyaretnam said in a statement.

We can only hope that the new ambassador will be a real change agent here.  However, the ambassador should recognise that democracy here should be for Singaporeans.  He should not try to pursue one that Americans “have ambitions for.”  Singapore does not need to live up to the Americans’ expectations.

Our nation is young and less mature than the West, what they have created and moulded over two centuries cannot and must not be forced on to us.  Opposition parties here must remember this, as they engage the new ambassador in his ‘public diplomacy’.

PM Lee said: “For the opposition, it’s a change – one scholar or two you think “wow” this is a luminous transformation. Well, it is a significant development … but finally let’s look at the person, not what degrees he has, but what he is able to do for Singapore.  “I can tell you, we interview many scholars and each time we field a few of them. And we interview other people too and we often field people who are not scholars. It is good to see it in perspective.

Source: CNA

PM Lee was responding to a question at the Singapore Perspectives Forum on recent reports about ex-government scholars joining the opposition.  Mr Tony Tan Lay Thiam and his wife, Ms Hazel Poa, both 39, are former government scholarship holders who have become members of the opposition Reform Party. They currently run a chain of tuition centres.

PM also said: “We hope that anybody who enters politics is somebody of not just ability but integrity and commitment. These are young people who have got good records academically and been in the civil service.”

The first sentence is fair, and logical.  But when taken together with the second, it appears to suggest that Tony and Hazel only have good academic records to show for.  Did PM just take an oh-so-subtle dig at the couple?  Could integrity and commitment be wanting in these 2 ex-scholars?  Well, perhaps so from the perspective of the PAP.  The duo left the service (’no commitment’) and perhaps broke a bond (’lack of steadfast adherence to the civil service ethnical and moral codes’).  

 PM goes on to say:  “We wish them well, but we hope Singaporeans will judge individuals like that as rigorously as they would judge individuals who join the PAP side. In other words, it’s not just what degree you have, but what sort of person are you and what can you do.”

Well, we will certainly do that and maybe we can do better than the PAP.  Chances are, they never thought the 2 would leave the service, or even join an opposition party.  To clarify, the duo’s actions do not disqualify from being good politicians.  We should applaud them for doing what they thought was right. 

Now the ball is in their court.  And ours.  We are watching you, Mr Tan and Miss Poa. 

We help ourselves. Don’t expect others to help

Tom Wright painted a bleak picture of Singapore’s property sector going forward at The Wall Street Journal. His article ended with the following:
“I’m yet to see the light at the end of the tunnel [for Singapore],” says Mr. Tan, the high-end broker.
We would expect people to continue to dig the dirt and tell it to [...]



Our skin isn’t as thick as it should be

The Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) organised a seminar on March 4 to discuss Singapore’s political blogosphere.  Tan Tarn How, Senior Research Fellow and Research Assistant Tan Simin presented their paper on trends observed in the blogosphere.  As reported in the TOC, the researchers identified the following limitations:

The online-offline firewall, while somewhat alleviated by offline [...]



Singapore and Lee Kuan Yew – The answer to the African problem?

Recently, I followed a thread “Democracy and Economic Growth” which started in PoliticsForum.org.   Apparently, members there often question the role of democracy in a developing nation. “During the wave of democratization in Africa during the 90s, many people had renewed hope for the continent, immediately equating newly established democracies to economic growth. Are these democracies [...]



Tell Singapore government: Ask them a question or give a suggestion

We informed people about the “Tell Singapore Government” subsite and have received some interesting reaction at some forums.
See: 3in1 Kopitiam, Sam’s Alfresco Coffee, Singapore Kopitiam, SgForums
Our responses to some of the comments are listed below. If we are not answering some other specific questions, that is because we do not know how.
 

Petitions

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

I don’t know

Our Singapore

As seen by people

• 
  

• Purpose

To observe, analyse, present our position, and call for action. Read our articles, give your views, and learn together with us.