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?