Just the other day, an Indian man came to deliver a bed I ordered.

He was sad. After the Ministers Pay hike was announced, the policy makers begin to tell companies to be circumspect in raising workers salary.

What perfect timing.

At the end of the day, it is the prosperity of us Singaporeans that should be the basis for judgement of ministerial performance. We have had to suffer cuts in CPF to help the nation tide through bad times and now we are required to contribute more in terms of CPF. There hasn’t been any significant improvement to our lives to justify the significant increases the ministers are getting.

Some people will say that benchmarking against the lowest is wrong. But it is not any more wrong than benchmarking with the highest. One extreme is wrong doesn’t mean the other extreme is correct.

Our government’s main selling point to us is that if our highly mobile elites were to leave us, our leadership would be badly shaken and we would all suffer as a consequence. This is fallacious for several reasons:

Firstly, to insist that the government control the entire economy and to place our future in the hands of a few elites may not be the wisest thing to do. It may have worked fine in the past when things were a lot simpler. But with globalisation and increased technological leaps, it gets harder and harder for any individual, let alone an elite to strike lottery. For if the elite fails, it would mean dire consequences for us all. We only need to look at our once over dependence on electronics manufacturing to understand that our elites can and do fail terribly.

Much better to shrink the government and let economic decisions dissipate throughout the population. Two heads are better than one and three non-elites beats one elite any time. So rather than pay a premium to keep those elites, let these elites dissipate throughout the economy which can only strengthen, not weaken our economy.

There is truth to the government’s argument that a welfare state will weaken our nation. One only has to look at US and Germany to know the huge amount of resources needed to support those out of job. The fallacy of this argument is that we are so, so far away from the level them in terms of public assistance.

There is really not a lot the government can do to improve the poor lot except to give them money. Be it workfare or minimum wage or protection, whatever you call it, you cannot run away from these social responsibilities.

Raises:
$2 million
estimated annual salary of Singapore’s Prime Minister, Lee Hsien Loong, after the government announced it would increase ministers’ pay by up to 60%.
$400,000
annual salary of US president George W. Bush.

granted, US politicians do get certain kickbacks.. (I suppose we can imagine Monica Lewinsky as once being desirable..)

- Once we detect the economy is slowing down, we should
immediately raise the Minister’s salaries so we
can get the economy to pick up again

- If the economy is flat, we should immediately raise the
Minister’s salaries so we can get the economy going

- Once we detect the economy is growing fast, we should
immediately raise the Minister’s salaries so can
can get the economy to move even faster !

If we have rankings of “key appointments holders” of various countries:

US – president ranks x1 of all professional pay
UK – PM ranks x2
etc

The data can be used as a reasonable and more convincing way determining the pay for SG ministers.

There are other reasonable ways to benchmark SG ministers way. The current benchmark invented by the PAP is not one of them.

These are the words of PM Lee after last year’s general elections:

“We must not allow ourselves to be divided between haves and have-nots, or winners and losers … if we let a politics of envy drive a wedge between us, our society will be destroyed, and all will suffer. That must never happen.”

From channelnewsasia.

It is precisely what is happening – and the PAP is the cause of it.

Regards,
theonlinecitizen

The Gods rewarded themselves for a “job well done” as theri entitlements, whereas The People are struggling with daily livings as affordable housing and medical care “are always hovering out of their reach” perpetually….as whenever there ready to grab one…”mean testing” and new policies (GST, utiltiies, public transport, HDB pricing, etc are icnreased) applied.

This is the two halves of SIngapore..
Either you “Haves” or “Have ntos”…nothing for “sandwich” class.

Singapore is a polarised sociey with a quantum gap between the “Haves” and “Have Nots”.

what prc NS and prc of a soldier’s life, if so called leaders of the family nation thinks abt their pockets first.
It may be unhygienic but he Chinese/family eat out of the same bowl.

sam

Last May, 66.6% of us rubber stamped their past and future decisions.

We knew what was going to happen.

So Singaporeans, stop whining and reap what you voted.

What saddens me is that the citizens of Singapore are a hardworking bunch of people and they are never credited for building up the nation, instead the government gets full credit for it. When the time comes to increase pay, the government gets it instead of the people. Its this kind of two-faced approach towards us, the citizens of Singapore that is really increasingly unbearable.

Just think with the one major cost of living being driven up, property prices, naturally only the foreign expats earning supernormal profits will be left here…thereby representing the top earners….and we know where that will lead. More pay hikes for ministers because the country top earners are earning more! Just pay more…. soon there will be nothing but expensive representative offices and cheap foreign workers living in containers and we can all move to JB or Bintan and start over again.

This whole exercise may just backfire when the next crisis struck. Be it financial like the Asian Financial crisis in 97/98, or medical such as SARS in 2003, it would be very difficult for the political leaders to rally Singaporean together.

At least I won’t bother to stand together with them. They have taught me what the Cantonese would say : Kee Kee Koo Kee Kee.

Singapore is losing her humanity, no thanks to their political leadership.

probably started drifted off a long while back. lol.

There would seem to be an inherent bias that if I know my pay is benchmarked against the top 50 paying professionals, I would be motivated to see what policies i can make to raise their salaries.

That said, the salaries of the top 50 or 100 people in any field in the private sector are not likely to be affected by govt policies much. I’m pretty sure that Wee Cho Yaw’s salary is not much affected by govt policies directly.

Moreover, the richest in the country are also the most mobile. Given enough disincentives or disadvantages, they will leave taking their business and their capital with them. In IR-speak, we must know how to treat the whales well.

And while there is a lot of things the govt can do to raise the salaries of the lower income (e.g. minimum wage, protecting industries, preventing layoffs/retrenchment) in the long term, these policies may not be in the best interests of Singapore.

I agree with the principle that the income of poor should be a deliverable that contributes to the decision as to whether Ministers salary goes up or down, but at this point it is at best a concept.