Jamus starts visiting residents again.
6 hrs·
This week, we relaunched house visits, albeit on a much-reduced scale (just two other volunteers, along with myself). We wrapped up 356A
#Anchorvale, which we were halfway through when Phase 2(HA) restrictions kicked in.
We spoke with many residents who were happy to see us back on the beat (like Sakthi and his family, pictured here). But I was struck most by the situation faced by the residents of the last unit we visited. The household of six (four kids—they are surely contributing to raising our nation’s dismal total fertility rate) had been repeatedly rejected from government financial support. The reason is that they live in a four-room flat; the assessed value of their unit would thus disqualify the family from virtually all assistance schemes. Mind you, this was a family whose combined income amounted to a total of $1,600, which had to support not just the couple, but their four young children.
I understand, of course, that this family’s situation is nowhere near as desperate as those of other families I’ve encountered (we had one at our virtual meet-the-people session this week, where 12 were crammed into a two-room rental flat). But I do not believe that a family that desires to go two-to-a-room, separating the boys from the girls, is living in the lap of luxury.
More generally, this case strikes me as one of the shortcomings of our all-or-nothing criteria for accessing our social safety net: earn a dollar more than $650 per capita, and you don’t quality for a cent of social services support; live in a flat worth more than $21,000 annual value, and you don’t get a single GST voucher.
Sometimes, hard lines are necessary. But do we truly believe that a family living on $1,900 a month is all that different from one living on $1,901? While such thresholds make for an easy checklist for qualification criteria, they hardly do justice to the vagaries of the real world, where an unexpected illness can easily throw off expenses for a family living from hand to mouth. This “cliff effect” is well-known, but by the same token, there are also a number of mitigation mechanisms.
After all, we seem to appreciate the value of graduated thresholds in a host of other areas of public policy. We recognize marginal tax rates by income bracket, and HLE loan amounts vary according to one’s CPF and cash savings. Students who just fail to qualify for the top secondary school nevertheless gain admittance to the second or third best ones. We already accommodate such gradual support education in workfare; it strikes me as reasonable to evaluate similar mechanisms for our other social support schemes.
#TeamSengkang #SengkangGRC