Face Change Phase Change

I still remember the stunned look on the faces of George Yeo and his GRC team when their lost to the WP in the last GE finally sunk in. The outcome caught them completely flatfooted. There have been quite a few tentative changes in their policies since then, but by and large, the core of their policies have remained unchanged.

For the most part, they are still trying to defend the indefensible and justify the unjustifiable. Take for example the current blogger's post that apparently went viral and Minister of State Mr Tan Chuan Tjin's response:

MOS Tan Chuan TJin responds to blogger’s post gone viral

Reading through the article and some of the forum comments, I cannot help but feel the gulf and disconnect between Mr Tan's response and where the commenters were coming from.

There has been a phase change in the psyche of the Singapore electorate, the scale and depth of which apparently has yet to sink into the consciousness of the government leadership. In chemistry, all it takes to kick start the crystallization process is just a tiny seed crystal. All it took to set off the conflagration in the Middle East was Mohammed Bouazizi's act of self immolation in Tunisia.

Similarly, WP's election victory in the last GE is the seed crystal that is catalysing the change in the political ground. It is in the nature of such changes that once the process begins and the ball starts rolling, it is extremely difficult to reverse the process without expending a huge amount of energy or effort. Nothing the government has done thus far even comes close to addressing this challenge.

The old playbook doesn't work anymore. I think the government realises this, hence the reticence in holding the by-election in Hougang. Same-old same-old just isn't going to cut it anymore. It may be time for the really good men to cut ranks for the good of the country if they cannot institute change from within or else be equally guilty by continued association with the status quo.

MAS Loses Head, Gives US$4 Billion MORE to IMF

Well, maybe this shouldn't be considered news. MAS appears to have lost its head for quite sometime already. The organisation that we used to look on with justifiable pride has lost its mantle of financial prudence. First by letting financial institutions sell structured products of dubious benefit to Singaporean investors and then dropping the ball completely in the recent MF Global theft of segregated client funds.

And now this pledge of US$4 billion to the IMF which MAS had the gall to tell Singaporeans would "still remain part of Singapore's official foreign reserves". Hello...when you loan someone money, all you have left is an IOU that is only as good as the credit worthiness of your debtor. If it is truly still a part of our foreign reserves, then would the MAS confirm that we can use it to offset our international trade imbalances? For that to work, we should pledge it to the BIS (Bank of International Settlements) instead and tell the IMF to borrow it from them.

I'm not suggesting that Singapore should not carry our weight and shirk our responsibilities as members of international organisations. But the MAS is being less than honest I think in trying to pre-emptively deflect legitimate Singaporean concerns by downplaying if not outright lying about the risks.

Our US$4 billion contribution is a trifle and is more symbolic than critical to the IMF. It is however a telling sign of the desperation and credit worthiness of an entity when they need to accept contributors from small creditors. Any 'loans' made in this case should be with eyes wide open and realistically marked as a gift (ie: total loss) in our books.

Take a look at the following article from 2010:
IMF Prepares For Global Cataclysm, Expands Backup Rescue Facility By Half A Trillion For "Contribution To Global Financial Stability".
We can see quite a few of the contributors to the IMF are in the eurozone and thus are in no position to contribute their share. Afterall, this 'firewall' is meant for their protection!

Meanwhile, not a peep has been heard from the Protector of our Reserves, President Tony Tan. Apparently he is there to guard the reserves from being mis-spent on Singaporeans but when it comes to mis-spending it elsewhere, it's fine.

Addicted To Growth

Today we are treated to a scare piece courtesy of SPH: "Population will shrink from 2025 without new (ie: foreign immigrants) citizens". Apparently this is supposed to be a BAD thing. If you have an addiction problem, going through cold turkey (deprivation) is part of the process of getting cured.

Unfortunately in this case, the addict (the government) is running the rehabilitation program. It is thus no surprise that the prescription is not LESS but MORE of what is the root cause of the problem. An economic model based on perpetual growth is simply mathematically not sustainable over the long term. But like a true addict, the government wants MORE.

Just as surely as ever increasing doses of a drug inevitably kills the addict, unmitigated growth will just as inevitably lead to a countrys' collapse. Having being caught in the growth trap and become addicted to it, like a drug addict, the government is finding it hard to kick the habit and is now resorting to scare tactics to help get public support for its addiction.

There are NO painless solutions to the growth addiction. We either suck it in and take the pain now or we kick the can down (in our case, a very short road on account of our being a Little Red Dot) and find ourselves in even greater pain later. Pain that won't be shared by the present leadership because by then they would have safely retired with the means to escape the mess thanks to our generosity in paying them millions.

If we were to question the officers behind the NPTD study (National Population and Talent Division) on the consequences of their recommendations beyond 2060 as reported in the press, I think we will receive a very Gerald Ee answer: "Oh...that is not in our frame of reference, so we did not think about it." A study like that is like training a recruit how to pull out the pin of a grenade but not teaching him how to throw it after doing that.

Just consider this, if the Stop at Two family planning program in the early years of our independence had not been a success, today we would be staring at a even bigger silver tsunami problem. The present government is taking a too simplistic and short sighted view focused solely on the tax revenue generated by working adults to fund support for the present elderly while completely discounting the inconvenient fact that the tax generating adults of today will in due time become an even BIGGER cohort of tax revenue consuming elderly themselves.

How does this solve the sustainability problem? We are at best deferring the (by then, even BIGGER) problem to the next generation. If we have to, we should use our reserves to see this current generation of post war baby boomer elderly through. We just have to make sure that this would be the ONLY time we EVER have to do this.

Juicing economic growth via imported low cost foreign labour or immigrants is a short term short sighted EASY decision to make. DPM Teo Chee Hean has said that the government is not afraid to make HARD decisions. Given that the NPTD is working under his direction and by this report on the study, I think he has chickened out. What do you think?