Post No. 118: Brief Afterthoughts About National Day Rally 2007

The problem of not having enough monies for all the government departments to spend is actually caused by excessive spending due to past habits of spending on budgets talked about for years even by PM Lee.

But what has he done to solve such a serious problem?

It looks like he is always talking about talents of his ministers. But which ministers can really be credited for coming up with solutions to such a problem.

There is hardly any attempt by the post-65 or younger ministers to solve such a wasteful problem.

One possible solution is to reward any budget left-over or surpluses over the mean for 5 years with points from which departments concerned would be entitled to have certain percentage increases in performance bonuses.

In this way, the civil service can then develop higher level of creativity and entrepreneurship and people at the end will truly benefit from savings and look forward to less taxes and fee increases.

Now all the budgets allocated will simply be spent despite years of talking about such inherent human tendencies to over-spend citizens’ monies because of wasteful budgeting process.

No wonder the Auditor General had to be confronted with revealing so many losses and malpractices after the NKF saga as people are now wondering whether there are similar cover-ups and other problems are being caused by wrongful practices due to lack of accountability under the autocratic system.