Tan Kin Lian's Blog: A vision for an egalitarian economy

Tuesday, June 08, 2010

A vision for an egalitarian economy

In recent years, Singaporeans have experienced a higher cost of living, widening wage gap, stagnant incomes and insecurity of jobs. This is reflected in a falling birth rate, which has become among the lowest in the world. Something is wrong.

What is the alternative? I read a few articles from the website of the Singapore Democratic Party. Here is a summary of their key proposals. You can read more details in separate articles in their website. I find their proposals to be quite sensible.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...: High costs of living is still ok if u hv a job.
But a lot of "snr citizens" and older PMETs are jobless. It is also very difficult for them to find a job. How to survive??; June 09, 2010 7:19 AM
C H Yak said...: The Govt had set the wrong direction in the case of older PMETs.

(a) First, the NTUC Chief then talked about pre-emptive layouts for older workers above 40 (I believe the definition of older workers include PMETs) ... while the NTUC was aligned towards the employers.

(b) Then the CPF policy was used as an economic tool and the wage of older PMETs was targetted over the last few crisis...lowered CPF income cap to $4,500 giving employers great saving in wage cost...and CPF contribution by employers is already lowered progressively as one hit 50...while employers continued to take advantage of the situation.

(c) Retrenched older PMETs are not protected by employment acts in respect of severance pay and retrenchment benefits. The MOM is not prepared to go all out with policies :-

See my blog aT :-

http://de-leviathan.blogspot.com/2010/02/speedier-mediation-for-pmes.html

(d) While retrenchment continues to rise against PMETs and hit new high as published in MOM website. Older PMETs are most vulnerable.

(e) The excuse for the Govt perhaps - we are busy keeping the ordinary workers employed ... and there is no time for you PMETs ... we need to target & sacrfice you only for wage cuts when we are using our economic tools.

(f) And all of you workers (young & old) including PMETs ... work to 62 or even 65 if you can ... because we need the CPF intact; in order to minimise payouts of social benefits...while we will invest them to earning more "pocket money" for the SWF and /or MNC...but if we do lose billions in investments through our SWF it is considered your money.; June 09, 2010 10:40 AM
Anonymous said...: Those miw want us to be faster, better and cheaper. But they paid themselves obscene salary. Two sets of measures seems to exist in Singapore under the current miw - good one for the elite themselves and the painful one for the rest.

Let's wait to see what punishment will be given to that swiss guy for vandalism. I wouldn't be surprised that there exist two sets of law also - more lenient one for foreigners and harsh one for local.

Merlion; June 09, 2010 12:54 PM
Anonymous said...: There is only one way to achieve an egalitarian society in Singapore.

There is only one way for Singaporeans to be faithful to the oath they make when they recite the National Pledge every morning when they were in school.

You all know what needs to be done.

As the Nike slogan so aptly puts it, "Just Do It".; June 09, 2010 4:40 PM
Anonymous said...: dear mr tan,

every year, singaporean parents spend a lot of money on our childreneducation.

do you mind helping to calculate the true cost of education in singapore?

we pay taxes and school fees.

but on top of this, we still have to fork out tuition fees, and many extras for our children.

are the childrenalso wasting their lives in bad public education?

hope you can explore this for the sake of singapore.

Thank you very much for serving the public.; June 14, 2010 6:47 PM