Dear Lawrence Wong, it’s simply not true, as you claimed during a visit to Sengkang yesterday, that you are doing everything you can to support Singaporean families with children. You talked once again about your CDC and now the SG60 vouchers. You cited the one time disbursement of $500 in LifeSG credits for children aged 12 and below. You touted your Large Families Scheme for those with three or more children including an annual LifeSG credit of $1,000 for one to six year olds and a $10,000 one-off grant for children above two.

However the vast bulk of families have at most 2 children and many can only afford to have one. They don’t have the income or the space as our HDB flats have shrunk and the population density of estates has spiralled upwards due to the huge growth in new citizen and PR numbers.

Reform Party has advocated since 2015 for the payment of Child Benefit to mothers monthly. We started off with $300 a month per child but given inflation and the growth of government revenues it should be at least $500 per month now. This payment, unlike the Working Mother Child Relief, would be given irrespective of whether the mother was working or not. I know that your government doesn’t want to encourage those seen as poor or unproductive to have too many children given your attachment to the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s eugenicist beliefs. Needless to say, I don’t support those beliefs, and especially now that declining population is far more serious an issue than overpopulation.

You say you are doing all you can but this is simply untrue. Even on your highly restricted definition of the Budget surplus, which excludes earnings from land sales and past reserves but counts top ups to endowments and trust funds as spending, the surplus over the last 2 Budgets has been over $12 billion, helped by the totally unnecessary increases in GST. The General Government cash surplus for 2021-23 has been about $34 billion and this does not take into account any rise in the value of the assets held by Temasek, GIC or MAS and accumulated earnings from these assets. The total value of the Government’s reserves is likely over $3 trillion net of debt and over $4 trillion if you include assets backed by debt, all of which is denominated in S$ as opposed to foreign currency debt.

Instead of the wayang of pretending that you are doing the best you can for Singaporean families why not come clean and say you are suffering an abundance of riches. Or if not explain what has happened to the reserves. You boast of Singapore’s high GDP growth, almost all achieved through population growth, while driving down the share of consumption to below 40% through high taxes on the less well-off (GST) and forced saving through CPF. At the same time as Singaporeans are having to tighten their belts to fund the additional GST and rising costs due to higher rents, something the Government directly controls through its land monopoly, Government Ministers, including Shanmugam, don’t have to pay any taxes on the staggering rises in value of their landed properties when they sell them. These price rises, like the 1100% gain on Shanmugam’s GCB in 20 years are driven in large part by the fast tracking to citizenship of wealthy foreigners.

Singaporeans should rightly be sceptical of your claims that you are doing the maximum you can to help them when you refuse to tell them what the reserves are, insist they need to be safeguarded for future generations and then decline to admit the elephant in the room which is that the majority of these future generations are likely to be from abroad. People who endure lives of austerity only to die childless and leave vast wealth to charity or the state are rightly regarded as delusional. Is the PAP Government similarly delusional or does it have ulterior motives which it’s keeping secret from Singaporeans? It’s time to take back your rights as citizens of a free country. Take back what belongs to you.

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