Wah so how did you end up a PAP doggy like what ppl here are saying?
Contrary to popular belief I am not a PAP member nor am I paid to post here. Before I started my current job and travel the world I was very much a WP supporter(although I still hated SDP way back then due to CSJ) and that was the reason why I started reading this forum in the first place(I didn't join the forum until later but I was visiting here for a long time already). After I started traveling the world(sometime around 07), stayed and worked in various different countries and talked with many of my foreign colleagues I realize how well run our country is. We keep seeing the flaws in our own system but refuse to see them in others.
The Europeans have their welfare and pensions but they also pay a price for it. My German counterpart(equivalent position in the German office) for example pays 44% tax and his wife 48% tax(coz wife earns less, the person who earns less in the household pays more tax). That's not including the GST which can be anything from 0 to 17%. On top of that unlike our CPF which we can use to finance our property, they need to pay in cash after deducting tax. Also because the property in cities are so freaking expensive he stays in a village 1.5 hrs drive from Cologne, and the nearest convenient store is a 20mins drive. He has a freaking big and nice house but the price of having it is the house is in the middle of freaking nowhere. And BTW German retirement age, 67. Compare to me, not counting CPF, I paid what amounted to less then 3% of my annual income last year in Income tax. Yes they have very good welfare and pension, they also have to pay for it, and less we forget their system is not sustainable
Everyone told me Malaysia is cheap. When I complain SG is expensive in front of my Malaysian colleague, I got scolded by her. She listed item for item and dollar for dollar how someone working in Singapore with equivalent pay in SGD$ is way better off in Malaysia in MYR$. KL for example is not that even 1/2 as cheap as SG but the pple in KL earns about 1/2 the salary. Property in Malaysia to us is cheap, an apartment for $200-300K ringgit? That's only 150K sing but we forget, the pple in malaysia earn ringgit not SGD$. If you go out of the city to places like Ipoh, it gets cheaper but the wages also goes down. The same goes for many countries that we consider cheap. Even Hong Kong and Taiwan, the median income of Hongkies is 30% less then us and Taiwan is a further 30% behind Hong Kong. Yes we find shopping and eating in Hong Kong and Taiwan cheap, that's coz SGreans on the whole are a lot richer then them
Quite frankly for most of the countries I've visited(there are of coz better systems) we are still a lot better off then many of them. I support PAP's method to a large extend because i see how well the country is going. "Ponding", ministerial salary, the recent MRT breakdown is at worst minor inconveniences. In the grand scheme of things, the country is not going to, as Tracytan puts it, crumble due to those issues. The most important part of running SG is to ensure the country economy is doing well, the majority of the population have jobs and a roof over their heads. Things that we take for granted, things that the Europeans and the Americans now wished they had. Things which i am sure most pple who are not blind will agree with
Pple talk about the poor. Which freaking country doesn't have poor pple. I've seen poor pple in Europe and Australia, countries with freaking welfare systems. The dumbest way you help the poor is to give them money. I know, I was once one of them. If someone had been giving me money way back when I wouldn't have work as hard as I did and remain a bum. The government has the right idea, keep welfare to a minimum and concentrate on elevating the skills of the lower income to push them up the job ladder. Not everyone will succeed but it will help lower the number of pple at the bottom. They just need to make it more accessible. The only pple who should ever receive help are those who cannot help themselves, like the old, the disabled and the in special cases, the really desperate.
PAP has it's flaws namely on the issue of political freedom but running the country well is not one of them. I still sympathize with WP cause, I also believe we need a voice in Parliament however voting any tom dick or harry just becoz they are from the opposition is just stupid. We need some opposition in Parliament but we don't need
jokers like this idiot](NSP team in MP)[/URL. Also only concentrating on the flaws and ignoring all the good that our government has done is equally stupid. I had to leave the country to appreciate how good our own country is.