SONY just lost $1billion. GM n Chrysler has gone bust.

Americans are not buying, or spending their money, many fear that they will lose their jobs.

Singapore depends on its exports to America, and that has dropped severely.
I don’t see us coming out of this recession/depression for many more years.

My question is how is the Singapore Govt going to feed all of its people?

With the cost of living ever rising so quickly and the salary diminishing so drastically. How can the average Singaporean really survive? We were suckered into material comfort over those years when the economy is doin well. With the economic downturn. People start loosing their cushy and relatively well-paid job and are still stuck with the day-to-day household expenditure, mortgages, hire-purchase, etc…….With little jobs in sight and still having to fight it over with our FT counterpart. Man! Where are we headed? We were told to bite-the-bullet and ride thru this time of hardship. Can the ruling party please lead by example?

Our ruling party advocating, pay peanuts you get monkeys policy. Is it really working? We are still in the doldrum, aren’t we?

Btw, why do we need million bucks senior minister(SM) and mentoring(MM) for our PM? You mean he is not capable for the job? Never heard of such nonsense before.

Like most business model, maybe we should outsource capable FT(on contractual basis, that does not cost millions) to manage all our different Ministries. We would have abundance balance in our resources to look after all our aged, sick and neeedies.

To Rajiv Chaudhry, thanks for the fantastic article. Looking forward to the last part. Cheers!

why do we need or want a greater GDP.. why not have a constant sustainable GDP that will serve 3.5 million Singaporeans well rather than have unsustainable growth at the expense of Sinagporeans who subsidise FT and companies..

and just because MM says so doesnt mean so.. it only means that some 80 yr old guy with lots of vested interest wants to put forth an idea without have to prove that it is absolutely necessary…

someone will always have to make the payment .. lets not buy the product..

we are constantly told to retrain.. upgrade our skill..

while the government constantly undercuts our wages by introducing (dumping) cheaper workers into the economy.. its not that the singaporean worker is not qualified.. its that the companies don’t want to pay the required wages.. ours is not a free economy where demand and supply finds an equilibrium price .. what we have is a planned economy.. subservient to the FDIs received.. the govt promisses the foreigners (business) that they will have low taxes.. low wage costs.. compliant workforce.. (tripartite bullshit)… great living…

what do the citizens get… fear of losing their jobs.. escalating cost.. unfair competition.. uncertain retirement… /// of course lets not forget our 1st class government..

what we need is a true voice of the people.. at the moment we have none..

how does the towkay make his money..??..

you can argue the point that thru him and his ideas of providing a service or product he monetises a potential value which would otherwise have remained dormant ..probably wasted..

or…

he is a predator.. he searches for prey who will work for less than what they will need to survive.. sells the products or services for more than they(prey) need to pay… hence the reward.. the more slaves he has working for him the better.. the less he can pay them the better.. this way his workers / slaves pay him everyday..

…. lets consider who we all pay… and what we have gotton in return for our good work.. also, consider that we are paving the same slave career path for the little ones who comes after us..

terminology aside, what you said may very well be true, the average citizen will only be marginalised further if this continues. with locals getting the short end of the stick during economic downturns & formulating the new Public Order Act (POA) to dicisively deal with dissent?

what they doing is to import from neighbouring countries, fast trek them to PR and give them citizenship. One indonesian bought 51 units of condo? Did not you hear it? Many rich indonesians relocated to Singapore and bought 1000s of condo. Not to mention rich Thais or PRCs.

i think the government understands that the average people are getting very disgruntled. they will never change their policies although average citizens are marginalised gradually. so they end up importing what they marketed as “Foreign Talent”, which to me is a marketing term carefully branded for mass acceptance.

Where I might add a couple of comments:

I think if we consider all areas in totality and not a subset the govt has done an excellent job of managing the many tradeoffs and constraints on our small island (and no, I do not work for the govt or the party). Probably not possible to do much better – although we can all complain about the gahmen in some area.

Question is : have we more or less reached the limits of what Singapore can do. Future growth and progress come at an ever increasing price. If we look at the ever-escalating cost of building each expressway or MRT line, we can see that our system has become too complex with more and more interdependencies to be managed with increasing layers of coordination.

Next issue : the cost structure that we have slowly acquired is predicated upon a certain level of growth/prosperity. When the investment dollars necessary to fund maintenance of our various infrastructure systems start slowing, we will have to make certain tradeoffs on what we can afford. Just look at a big city like London, its struggling healthcare and underground systems, and look at how much money is spent for relatively little impact on the NHS and Transport for London.

So, what is the solution or what ideas at least can we come up with? Look forward to parts 3 & 4.

If you are asking if they can vote upon receiving their IC’s. I really donno leh. Ask, go to the kpt and ask for the answer with that kpO. Best…

keke, i stand corrected on…

////They should not be allowed to vote because they are not entrenched singaporeans.////

… i dunno how to put it in proper context, but agak the the concept of the right to vote (is there?). heh…

once they got their S’pore citizenship would they really exercise that right to vote judiciously? or just teekum teekum can liao?

eh, what is CCP & BOP?

They should not be allowed to vote because they are not entrenched singaporeans. Giving them the vote is equivalent to giving the CCP and the BOP, and wherever else they hail from an in-road into Singapore politics. That would be the real stuff of nightmares.

wait like Aware Saga. newbies come in, vote out ruling party by the strength of sheer numbers. wow!! o.O

any thoughts on this??

The solution to having a future high GDP disproportionate to a still relatively small population is to maintain or develop high-value industries and services. The life sciences and research drives and the 2 IRs are steps in this direction.

As an analogy, the aesthetic physician who gives Botox jabs to only 10 patients a day seems to have a rather empty waiting room if you happen to walk past his clinic at any time of the day. On the other hand, the GP next door may have a waiting area filled to the brim throughout the whole day, yet he actually earns less than the aesthetic physician.

Of course, there is a limit to this. As Singapore’s economy matures further, growth rates will moderate. The high growth rate policy is not fixed, but is subject to future conditions.

It is a mistake of this article to extrapolate from present conditions to future trends without considering the many variables and uncertainties in the intervening period, and then agonize over its own extrapolations. This only creates unnecessary alarm and anxiety.

The Minister (of ND) has mentioned a figure of S$700 million for the greening of Singapore.

I was actually referring to primary and secondary jungle such as is found around MacRitchie reservoir and Bukit Timah Hill. If you are a nature lover, these have a different appeal. These jungles have taken millions of years to evolve (as have the mangrove forests in the coastal areas). Once destroyed, they are gone forever and no amount of money can bring them back.

Singapore, and the world, will be the porer for the loss.

‘As for greenery, the government has already bulldozed most of the primary and secondary jungle on the island, including the large mangrove forest in Punggol[vii]. It is only thanks to the foresight of 19th century colonial administrators that we have the central catchments containing the last remnants of primary Malayan forests on this island.’

To be fair, the National Parks Authority has undertaken a prudent policy of planting lots of trees all over Singapore, over the years. Which is why we have a very green city state. One would be hard pressed to find a greener city in Asia.