In your CNY message, you express the hope more Singaporeans will try for a baby in the Year of the Dragon. You note that TFR rates have been declining in Singapore (in 2021, it was 1.04, about half the replacement rate of 2.1), as they have been globally, and say that your government has been taking steps to address the work-life balance and build a “SIngapore Made For Families.” Your message seems to be just a rehash of what Indranee Rajah said in Parliament in February last year and that I countered with my blog post, “If Indranee Says Singapore Needs More New Citizens Because Our Population Is Declining Then Who Precisely Are We Safeguarding the Reserves For?“ . (Because you have instructed Facebook to disable my links to prevent Singaporeans from learning the truth, readers will need to copy and paste the blog name into their browser).

Like all the other phrases your Government’s foreign media consultants, working for your re-election but paid with state funds, come up with, this is just another piece of Orwellian Newspeak designed to gaslight Singaporeans into believing your fake version of reality. Phrases such as “inclusive growth”, when your Statistics Department calculates a Gini coefficient that excludes capital and foreign income and thus makes SIngapore look much more equal than it really is, “meritocracy” when the spouses and children of Cabinet Ministers and MPs hog the top positions in state companies starting with your wife’s long time tenure as head of Temasek on a salary you refuse to disclose and “progressive tax system” when there are no taxes on capital and the top rate of tax is less than half that in other advanced countries.

Singapore is very far from being “Made For Families”, Singaporeans still have to bear heavy costs for delivery and hospitalisation during pregnancy whereas in most developed countries it’s free or covered by insurance. Singapore parents are exposed to potentially very high costs if there are any kind of complications unless they buy additional health insurance. Medisave may not cover all of it and for those without Medisave balances they will have to pay out-of-pocket.

While you have raised Baby Bonus (who thought up that name?) to $11,000 for the first and second child ($13,000 for subsequent children), only $6,000 is given in the first year and from 2 onwards the amount is only $800 a year. Furthermore, this ends when the child reaches 6. The First Step Grant does not make up for free healthcare or free preschool or childcare for children from 3 or 4 (and in many cases from even earlier) in most Western countries, together with generous financial support for low to median income families. In line with your Government’s elitist and eugenicist policies, payments above the Grant are only given on a co-matching basis. This favours only those who have least need of help. The same is true of the Working Mothers Child Relief ,which until it was amended recently to be capped at a fixed amount rather than a percentage of income, was a hugely expensive and unjustifiable subsidy for the rich.

Since 2015 Reform Party has called for a child benefit payment to mothers irrespective of whether they are working or not of $300 per child per month up to the age of 18. This should be easily affordable since it should not cost more than $2 billlion if restricted to the children of citizens only. This would deliver help to the families who need it most and not be based on rewarding those who least need it. If it encourages families to have more children then the cost would rise but this would be its purpose and would pay for itself as would be demonstrated by any rational cost benefit analysis. The payment could be made progressive with more than $300 to those living in 1-3 room flats and less to those in 4 and 5 room and private property.

You often ground your objection to spending more on families on the need to safeguard the reserves. Memorably, your former speaker, Tan Chuan Jin, whom you kept in office while not informing Parliament that he had committed a breach and was therefore totally unfit for the role, used the F-word to describe an Opposition MP who called for more spending. This comment sums up the PAP’s whole attitude to the reserves that they belong to them and are only there to benefit an elite.

Yet, as I pointed out in my blog a year ago, with a rapidly declining native born population it makes no economic sense not to spend a greater portion of the reserves on investing in Singaporeans. This may slow or even reverse the decline. $2 billion a year is peanuts, to echo a favourite PAP phrase when it comes to their own or their friends’ compensation from state funds, when set against at least $3 trillion, and possibly more of reserves. In actuality we could spend another $90-120 billion a year without depleting the reserves in real terms or putting our current account into deficit.

At the recent debate in Parliament on the reserves, NCMP Hazel Poa even plagiarized my point almost exactly word-for-word, when she questioned who Singaporeans are leaving their reserves to given that the total fertility rate has fallen to half the replacement rate. She also managed to mention most of the other points going back ten years or more, I have made concerning the use of the Budget to mislead Singaporeans and surreptitiously divert money into the reserves, without crediting me.

Dear Lee Hsien Loong, please don’t think we are so stupid. You are doing almost nothing to create a “Singapore Made For Families”. You need to give us the truth about the state of the reserves and explain why $3 trillion cannot translate into more help for struggling Singaporeans and their families. At the rate things are going in 100 years Singapore would be a ghost town were it not for your government’s rapid conversion of foreign workers at all levels into PRs and new citizens. While immigrants should be welcomed, the rationale behind your Government’s stinginess towards Singaporeans who have built up the reserves over generations of hardship and austerity needs to be explained.

Published by kjeyaretnam

I'm a Singaporean economist who became an opposition activist. I blog to provide an alternative to the porkies that the Pinkies tell. It just so happens that my alternative is the truth. That's why I've never been sued in any civil or criminal court no matter how hard hitting my criticism. I'm quoted and interviewed and asked to speak across the world but largely censored in Singapore in an effort to silence my political opinions. The left hate me because they think I split their vote and because I eschew their outmoded economic models. Models that don't work. The Right and the Conservatives hate me because I'm a liberal. I'm not sure what the middle think of me. I don't think there are more than a handful of people in the middle, here in Singapore. I'm a Singaporean born and bred, dual heritage, my parents Singaporean established here before the State of Singapore was created. I'm not Eurasian. I read economics at Cambridge and could be broadly described as from the Keynesian school but I believe in interventions. I was formerly a successful hedge fund manager. After economics and politics my greatest interests are history, film and Makan. I run but I run so I can eat like a Singaporean. View all posts by kjeyaretnam