Seems to me, there are more sports cars on the road every single day. You can’t really drive any where in town now without being behind or in front of one.
You can actually run into ( not literally) 3 GTRs in 1 night and it’s not at a night club.
Wonder where the impending recession is.
Less than 2 weeks from National Day, yet there is a conspicuous number of flags missing from a lot of windows this year.
I can usually brush off most of what is in the local news as silly, irrelevant or just another piece of government self advertisement. But occasionally I’ll come across something that is outright dumb.
http://business.asiaone.com/Business/Story/A1Story20080731-79925.html
The whole world is currently dealing with inflation, and everyone knows that it’s caused by oil and food price spikes. Yet our esteemed government is somehow implying that the pay rise of workers is somehow causing or will contribute to the problem. This is the same guy that said previously that it’s alright for rice price to spike by 30% or more, since we only spend a small portion of our income on rice….. hmmm… yes.. I can see the raionale.
Even if we believe that inflation is only 7.5%, that still means that all else being equal, everyone just got poorer by 7.5%. When SMRT and Comfort Delgro can go about hiking fares, citing higher oil price, to keep their profitability inline, and thereby compounding the inflationary issues, the average worker is supposed to such it in and take the wage cut for the sake of keeping headline inflation down?
Do we have this backwards?
Inflation is supposed to be a measure of price rise for the common person, so that he can measure his real income. Not just another government statistic. Like how GDP is supposed to be a measure of welfare of the people and growth in quality of life, not a measure for how much civil servants’ pay hike should be.
This country must be the only place on earth where the head of the workers “union” tells the workers to live with a lower real income and a lower quality to hold down a statistic. In which other country do we see the government’s answer to fighting against inflation to be hold down wages and “moderate” job growth. That’s like stabbing your right leg to take away the pain you’ll feeling in your left leg.
This particular inflation has 2 sources, oil and food. As mentioned in a previous post, Singapore had the third most expensive petrol in the world, before this recent spike. Again why so, and could something not be done about it. (Let’s not forget that Exxon just reported record profits yet again)
It seems to me that over here, the government seem to value profitability a lot higher than the welfare and quality of life of it’s people
