TR EMERITUS

Mr Tharman Shanmugaratnam "New council to create jobs on unprecedented scale". The above paragraph is the headline news in today's Straits Times. As Singapore eases up on our Circuit Breaker, what will follow will be massive unemployment. We are looking at 100,000 job seekers. This is akin to the British withdrawal from Singapore in 1971 and that withdrawal presented us with tremendous security and economic challenges. Singapore didn't falter under the pap old guard lion leadership. The rest is history. It is our very, very good fortunate to have a man in Tharman Shanmugaratnam leading the 17 members National Job Council (NJC). To me, none of those impeccably book-smart and clever talking 4G pap ministars could measure up to that mammoth challenge. Not Chan Chun Sing, not Ng Chee Meng, not Desmond Lee, not Josephine Teo, not Grace Fu or Isawaran etc. In fact, zero! My answer is simple. I consider all of them to be too pampered, sheltered, pretty divorce from life's harsh realities and do not possess enough sense of life's realism and survival instincts. The efforts of NJC alone is not enough. We need a sea change in the mentality and attitudes of every single one of our population to rally in this national endeavor. To those job seekers. I will say this to you. Do not be fussy, accept any job first and as one goes along, find a better one. Go for training, learn an useful skill, a half loaf of bread is still better than no bread at all and exercise maximum personal discipline and responsibility. For the employers, I sincerely urge them not to prejudice potential employees' because of age, sex, race or qualifications if the candidates are willing to be trained. A great attitude in any employee beats paper qualifications any day. Singapore and Singaporeans were much poorer and far lesser educated when the British left us in 1971. That didn't kill us. Today, although the challenges before us is huge, there is no reason for us to be disheartened. We must believe in ourselves. We can collectively overcome it once more. Think.   Simon Lim      Read More →

Tin Pei Ling, the young PAP MP who became notorious for her posts of Kate Spade handbags that surfaced during GE 2011, gave a speech in Parliament in which she claimed that her Government had provided the highest level of support in the world to Singaporeans on a per capita basis. She posted her speech on Facebook and I reproduce below what she said: I also shared a rough estimation of the COVID19 budgetary support per capita in Singapore and some of the advanced economies. Based on my back-of-envelope estimation, the budgetary support per capita in Singapore is $23,225, higher than Japan or the US (to standardise for comparisons, I took the entire package value divided by citizen population size). On per capita basis, Singapore tops the chart around the world. Based on the figures, I thought that this demonstrates our government’s determination in helping our people and seeing Singapore through the crisis. I was surprised by her calculations because I did not think the PAP Government had been particularly generous, particularly as far as its own citizens are concerned. So I decided to examine her claims more closely. Firstly she says: Within a short span of 5 months, our government is pumping in S$93billion just to combat the pandemic. This amount already exceeds the total full year public expenditure in 2019. This is also the figure mentioned by Seatwarmer-in-Waiting Heng Swee Keat in his recent Fortitude Budget statement: Together with the Unity, Resilience and Solidarity Budgets, we are dedicating close to 100 billion or $92.9 billion to be precise or 19.2% of our GDP, to support our people in this battle. However a comparison of the total expenditure for 2020 including special transfers but excluding transfers to endowments and trust funds (which are are not current spending and may never be spent) versus the same figure for 2019 shows that the increase was only some $65 billion. Also the special transfers figure in the Unity Budget of $34 billion presumably includes the extra $13 billion which Heng is allocating to the Contingencies Fund. These figures can all be found at: https://www.singaporebudget.gov.sg/budget_2020/budget-speech The Contingencies Fund is one of the funds shown as liabilities in the Government’s Statement of Assets and Liabilities (SAL). As I showed in my last blog, these do no appear to form part of past reserves and strongly support my case that there are substantial reserves not shown in the SAL, possibly as much as $1 trillion more than shown. If I subtract the $13 billion allocated from past reserves to the Contingencies Fund (which may never be spent) from the total for Special Transfers (excluding Top-Ups to Endowments and Trust Funds) then total spending is only some $52 billion more than last year. Another way of measuring the Government’s support is to look at the budget deficit in the Fortitude Budget statement of $74.3 billion and subtract both the Top-Ups to Endowments and Trust Funds of 17.3 billion and the allocation of $13 billion to the Contingencies Fund. This gives a figure of $44 billion. Heng says he has already allocated $20 billion to the Jobs Support Scheme to help fund up to 75% of the wages of Singapore citizens and PRs (Why PRs? Did they do NS?) capped at a $4,600 monthly salary (a figure that is curiously almost the same as the UK Government’s limit on its Furlough Scheme of £2,500 per month). However given that probably more than half of the economy should be classified as being in the public sector and that a large proportion of the Jobs Support Scheme will go to Government-linked companies (GLCs) we should probably deduct half of the $20 billion as just a transfer payment from central Government to other entities in the public sector. Since the Government keeps secret the General Government surplus, which should include all entities in the public sector including GLCs and take account of changes in the value of assets including land) as well as the true figure for the reserves, we have no idea of how much the real deficit is and are forced to guess. Also I have issues with the denominator Tin uses to calculate the benefit per capita. She says she used the number of Singapore citizens and PRs but really she should use Singapore’s total population. Our GLCs and private sector companies employ large numbers of foreigners, including many whose pay is hundreds of times what a Singaporean on median income earns like Piyush Gupta, the CEO of DBS, as well as low-paid migrant workers. While the Jobs Support Scheme is supposed to benefit SIngaporeans and PRs only, if it helps those companies to survive the pandemic then it also saves the jobs of foreign workers. If we do this and divide $44 billion by Singapore’s population in 2019 of 5.7 million, then we get a per capita figure of about $7,700 as opposed to Tin’s claim that it is $23,225. If we subtract the $10 billion which is likely just a transfer between Government entities then we get a figure of $5,965. This is less than half than Tin’s claimed figure of $12,765 per capita. This is presumably based on the roughly $2,7 trillion in stimulus allocated by Congress under the US$2.2 trillion CARES Act and the US$484 billion interim CARES Act which extended the funding for small businesses. However this is an unfair comparison because the US, Canada, the UK and Europe all have much more comprehensive safety nets such as unemployment insurance and welfare payments which automatically kick in when the economy goes into a recession. That is why they are known as automatic stabilisers because the additional spending helps to stop demand falling too much and the economy contracting further. A fairer measure might be the total projected US federal deficit for this year of US$3.7 trillion which would work out to roughly $15.585 on a per capita basis at current exchange rates,. Tin also includes only federal spending and not spending at the state and local level. With no entitlement to welfare benefits or unemployment insurance Singaporeans have been forced to turn to Heng’s ad hoc stopgaps such as the Temporary Relief Fund (TRF) where the stingy nanny state stands guard to make sure Singaporeans do not become lazy or addicted to welfare (while the PM’s wife seems to be on the world’s most expensive furlough scheme to allow her to post full time on Facebook to support her husband and develop her political career). Even the Self-Employed Income Relief Scheme (SIRS) seems to be operating in an arbitrary fashion and true to past history, Singaporeans face constant issues actually accessing the support promised. It has been outsourced to NTUC, a PAP-controlled organisation, presumably to try to make Singaporeans grateful to the PAP for the peanuts they receive and to swell its profits administering the scheme. Total direct support for Singaporeans from Heng’s Government amounted to a derisory $2 billion up to the Resilience Budget and is probably no more than $2.5 billion now. If that is divided among 4 million Singaporeans residents (citizens and PRs) that is about $620. Tin Pei Ling’s lazy and mendacious fabrications are fully deserving of a Correction Notice under the Government’s beloved Protection from Online Falsehood and Manipulation Act (POFMA). On Monday I intend to send an open letter to the Minister of FInance, Heng Swee Keat, to ask him to issue one. If he does not I will write to Facebook and ask them to put a warning on her account to the effect that it contains falsehoods. Unlike laid-off Singaporeans Ms Tin’s career appears to be prospering. No doubt she has moved on from the entry-level Kate Spade brand to a brand like Hermes which better suits her elite status.   Kenneth Jeyaretnam * The author blogs at https://kenjeyaretnam.com/ .  Read More →

I’ve been unemployed for a good portion of my working life and when I got a “corporate” job in my late thirties, everybody told me that I had to hang onto it because it was probably the only job that I would have. The reason for it was very simple, I started “working properly” in my late thirties and by the time I reached a certain level, I’d be “too old” to be employable. Like it or not, one of the worst of the “isms” in Singapore is ageism. While “racism” (particularly with the riots in the USA) and “sexism” make media headlines, ageism affects far more of us and in an age of shorter working life cycles, is perhaps a larger and more serious issue. Singapore is filled with too many stories of people in their mid-forties who have been retrenched and unable to find work but still stuck with mortgages and children whom they need to send to school. In a way, the down and out situation in Singapore is the mirror opposite of London. When I lived in London, the tramps camping at my door were inevitably young and white, who had fallen into a drug habit. In Singapore, by contrast, the old are inevitably old. In the pre-Covid-19 world, all you needed to do was to sit in any outdoor eating area and you’d find that the people doing the “heavy stuff” like carrying dishes were inevitably old as were the people desperate enough to go round tables trying to sell you tissue paper for a dollar or so. What makes this scene particularly sad is the fact that Singapore claims loudly and proudly to be an “Asian” society that “respects” elders. Ironically, the biggest proponent of “Asian Values” was the late Lee Kuan Yew, who grew up with a disdain for anything Chinese until he entered politics and realized that it was the Chinese Educated who demonstrated in the streets. The late Mr. Lee was a poster boy for “active aging,” working well past his ninetieth birthday. However, while he was busy ensuring himself jobs in the cabinets of his successors, it was a singular act. All his cabinet colleagues, including Goh Keng Swee, his loyal deputy who did the work, retired in what was called “leadership renewal,” or the process of getting the old to give way to the young. Mr. Lee was in theory right to focus on “leadership renewal.” There is such a thing known as hanging on too long and letting the things that made you great become a total liability to the people you once cared about. “Arab Spring” old folks on top who didn’t know when to let go. However, a good idea has been taken to an extreme, where old folks who never had salaries of our well-paid ministers are pushed out of work once they hit a certain age. In many cases its usually at an age where people still have mortgages and other hefty bills to pay. How did this happen? I believe that the heart of the problem is ideological. Singapore is famous for being the world’s “nanny state,” with the government behaving like a stern parent. For the most part, the parent has been wise in many of its decisions. However, the parent has been unable to listen to the realities on the ground. There’s been an ideological conflict at the heart of our governing philosophy. On one hand we’ve told the people that the only viable source of employment is foreign investors and the government. On the other, hand there’s also a message of “non-welfarism” where the government claims that it does not give out cash because it wants people to be self-reliant. This was perfectly fine when we had multinationals coming in and hired people for life. However, this isn’t the case anymore. The multinationals may still use Singapore as a regional base but the real markets are in other parts of Asia, with more to offer. Hence the situation became such that the “big” growth drivers were not hiring the way they used to and people were stuck with rising expenses and less stashed away. Like it or not, our CPF system, while useful, is inadequate. My ex-boss at Citibank, Mr. Eddie Khoo, told me, “Ask Singaporeans about a retirement plan and they’ll tell you there’s CPF. What they fail to realise is that most of your CPF is used for housing, it doesn’t give you enough cash.” Mr. Khoo was correct in that most of our forced savings was tied up in housing. What he didn’t add was that the government’s solutions to the “aging” problem has been to tie up CPF monies in CPF. First, they’ve been raising the minimum sum requirements along with the retirement age. Then they’ve capped the limit of what you can use it for. If I take myself as an example, the only thing that CPF has helped to do has been to defray my mortgage payments. However, beyond that, it’s become like a mirage, where I see more money being added to the account but with further restrictions on withdrawal, it is money I will realistically not be able to utilize as I age no matter how much I have. In addition to increasing the retirement sum, the other method has been to raise the retirement age. Like everything else coming from the Singapore Government, this sounds good in theory. Yes, people are aging but they’re healthier than they used to be and can remain useful. As Senior Minister, Tharman Shanmugaratnam has said, “No one is too old to hire, too qualified to adapt.” Unfortunately, the practice is rather different and getting Mr. Tharman’s words into practice will take time. You cannot change a culture of age discrimination overnight, even if the problem needs to be solved urgently. Again, I take myself as an example. I am turning 46 in November. I left my corporate job last year between my age and a Covid-19 ravaged economy, I’m challenged to think of what I’ll do next to feed myself. I’ve psychologically accepted that I am unlikely to ever go back to full time corporate again. So, what does someone like me do? Effectively, my only assets are the fact that I’m relatively healthy and I’ve met a few interesting people and done one or two things. So, to ensure I have enough money to pay for my bus card, I take up a bit of blue-collar work here and there. It’s not going to make me rich anytime soon but a few dollars in the pocket here and there. In addition to this, blue collar gigs allow me enough time to look at other things. I write more and I look for a bit of PR work here and there, which I can put aside to pay down debts and to set aside for the day when I’m a bit too old to do very much. Hopefully, I’ll be able to do things. However, the question remains, while I ever be able to earn enough remains on my mind and the answer for many people my age, is ironically, to look at other places to live. A lawyer I know is looking at Manchester as a retirement venue. An old editor believes that home may be in India. My kid, is telling me that we should look at Vietnam as a possibility. My Dad moved to Thailand and has a decent enough life. His point being, at 70 plus he gets the odd job here and there and he can afford a comfortable life style, which he cannot in Singapore. Perhaps the government in Singapore should consider this. If the aging are not allowed to contribute to Singapore, why should they stay there and spend retirement funds there?   Tang Li *Although I’ve been based mainly in Singapore for nearly two decades, I’ve had the privilege of being able meet people who have crossed borders and cultures. I’ve befriended ministers and ambassadors and worked on projects involving a former head of state. Yet, at the same time, I’ve had the privilege of befriending migrant labourers and former convicts. All of them have a story to tell. All of them add to the fabric of life. I hope to express the stories that inspire us to create life as it should be.      Read More →