i was checking on food court rental ads in sg, and a typical private ad asks for sgd7000 while a hdb or public ad asks for sgd3500. not really cheap.
The government makes big bucks from you by manipulating the public housing market through policies such as increase immigration and basing HDB prices on the resale market.
Your hawker centre food would have been cheaper if not for the higher rents and fees charged by the government.
Low taxes in sinkapore is a myth. You Pay And Pay through your nose!
I think my estate old lah, that's why. I have old hawkers selling tau huay zui for 30c small cup 50c big cup. Yes it's a legacy of an old system and no longer common, but you could think of it as a kind of subsidy (if HDB decides to let it out at "market rates" the rentals will definitely go up... probably some private developer will buy over the area and rebuild it as a food court - with more seats, less stalls.)
Re: immigration and housing prices - that is just tremendous inflation in housing price due to tremendous housing shortage. If all 1.5 million foreigners pack up and leave tomorrow there will be surplus housing - and prices will all fall. Does housing inflation drive up cost of everything else (including food)? Probably it does, right? How else will wage-earners afford housing?
About low taxes in Singapore... they're quite low what. Go live anywhere else in the world lor - taxes are probably higher. But life is better in those high-tax regimes too. Which shows high taxes can mean a good life (sometimes). It depends on how you spend the tax money.
and also for automobile owners, there's the extremely high 200% extra duty on the msrp plus coe, road tax, high cost of fuel with a tax component in the fuel cost, etc.
Yeah it's costly to drive in a crowded city - it'll always be. Here we're looking at tax not as revenue but as a way to change human behaviour. Or we're looking at tax as a way to internalise costs which would usually be externalised (congestion, pollution, infrastructure construction and maintenance, etc).
You want car-related taxes to go down? You'll need to live in a less crowded place. But crowding people together is supposed to bring about great economies of scale - which is why Singapore is going the whole hog towards doing it.
I don't know if I can stand living here in the long run. Some people shuttle from beautiful cubicle to beautiful cubicle their whole lives and enjoy it. I can't. I think it's Rube-Goldberg-ly stupid to subject yourself to that kind of life to earn money - and then to spend that money on vacations to re-connect with nature.
And I was just describing the plight of the middle-class. The poor shuffle from decrepit cubicle to decrepit cubicle (or sometimes to tents in East Coast Park), not earning much money, and probably not enjoying life too much, and they have no nature, and no vacations. And no way out of Hotel California.
