Minister pay cut justified?

Yes, it's trending on twitter and carried in newspapers all over the world, from Guardian to Bloomberg.
Everybody's talking about the seemingly massive 36% pay cut that Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has "agreed" to take.
While it's a long overdue step in the right direction, he remains, and by some orbital mile, the highest paid elected official on this planet. Still 4 times more than Barack Obama and 45 times that of Manmohan Singh.
But the root of the problem remains that many within the regime's ranks still think that high salaries are needed to attract the "best" talents to political office.
Such as one Grace Fu, who probably summed up what many of her colleagues feel:
"If the balance is tilted further in the future, it will make it harder for any one considering political office."

Unfortunately, money cannot be the main motivation for joining politics. You are simply attracting candidates that will put the moolah before servitude. Such as this MP with 64 other jobs.

Personally, I think the pay cut is totally justified and there should be more to come.

GDP growth, the indicator that PAP swears by, is looking extremely weak going into 2012. Singapore could again be the first Asian country to go into a technical recession defined by two consecutive quarters of negative growth.
The party state has failed to diversify from the volatile and highly competitive electronics sector which makes up a massive 35% of non-oil  domestic exports.
Worryingly, the Purchasing Managers' Index or PMI, which measures future business activity, has been declining for 6 straight months.

Granted that if US and Eurozone growth tank in 2012, and if there were a hard landing in China, most economies of the world will be adversely affected.
Difference is that other leaders don't have million dollar salaries nor tell the US to put its fiscal house in order.
I can't help but notice the inverted commas around the word Mentor in this WSJ article.

Additionally, the SMRT debacles, Orchard floods, taxi fare hikes and persistent rise in cost of living speak volumes of the extremely disappointing performance by our Ministers.
This move may have swayed some citizens over to their side.
But please ask yourselves this: Imagine that you were all shareholders of this company called Singapore Inc. Would you continue to agree to pay directors (Ministers) the highest salary among their global counterparts millions of dollars for repeated sub par performance?

I agree with some Opposition parties' suggestion that in addition to top earners, the average salaries of bottom and average earners should also be incorporated into the salary calculation.
After all, the greatest leaders (arguably) didn't have seven figure pay packages: Gandhi, Aung San Suu Kyi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, Tony Blair, Franklin D Roosevelt.....

Finally, an honourable mention to our dear President who apparently volunteered a 51% pay cut. Bravo!

Happy belated National Day Singapore

The Singapore economy continued its recent anaemic performance registering a quarter on quarter fall of 6.5% in Q2.
While the PAP has been vigilant in heaping self praises when the economy does well, its highly paid ministers go mysteriously quiet when the opposite occurs.
We do however get the customary incoherent rumblings such as the televised segment by Lim Swee Say.

Although the politicking in US Congress borders on silly, we should never disregard the need for a well-balanced government. If the Republicans and Democrats existed without opposition, then the US will be raising debt ceiling at a whim or following through a one-sided tax policy. This is potentially even worse for the global economy.
Incidentally, the US$2.1 trn increase in the debt ceiling is equivalent to giving US$295 to every man, woman and child on earth!

It's precisely the one-sided, unopposed policies of the PAP regime that has made Singapore ever so vulnerable to the global economy. Of course, no open economy is immune to what happens in US or Eurozone but the continued reliance on labour-intensive electronics and pharma manufacturing is worrisome.
For land scarce economies, services is the way to go. While the PAP has taken steps to increase services share of the economy to about 60%, it pales in comparison to Hong Kong's 90%.
And most of the increase came from the two casinos.

Our financial services sector lags far behind Hong Kong. IPOs in Singapore have slowed to a crawl in a time when big MNCs like Samsonite and Prada raised billions on HKSE. Despite the recent return to risk aversion, more massive offerings are still expected.

Our aspirations to be an education hub has suffered numerous setbacks. The number of private schools have fallen drastically caused in part by prior lack of proper monitoring from authorities.
In 2007, top Australian university UNSW unceremoniously pulled out of Singapore before the first students walked through its doors.
Don't let the high level of foreign enrollment in local universities fool you. According to a study by the British Council, Singapore does not feature within the top 10 countries favoured by foreign students. The "foreign talents" we are taking may not be the cream of the crop.

DPM Teo Chee Hean said there could be serious economic problems if what happened in the US were to happen to a smaller country and that the Singapore government has been undertaking many measures to deal with issues - such as building more HBD flats.
I may be missing his point but how does buidling more HDB flats alleviate economic woes? Maybe permanently barring private developers from building HDB flats would. How about imposing more restrictions on foreigner/PR ownership of public flats? In retrospect, if Mah Bow Tan had been relieved of his post sooner, that could have helped.

Party supporters will claim that most economies around the world are reeling right now and it isn't fair to judge their leaders' performance.
But wait, they do know we do have the highest paid ministers in the world. Our PM is paid 4-5 times more than President Obama.
This means that we have the right to expect superhuman performance from our government. Singaporeans must demand more ingenuity from Lee Hsien Loong ruling a tiny island than Obama watching over 50 American states.

Which is why the Elected Presidency, whether custodial or not, is so important. Law Minister K Shanmugan and a few others have been busy de-emphasising the Presidential powers. Outgoing President S R Nathan went as far as to say that the President is constitutionally obliged to act on advice of Cabinet. In other words, a puppet.
Then why elect a President? The PAP might as well promote one of its own all the time.
The President should have some power to check the decisions of each incumbent government.

The least he could do is to censure MPs who play with their mobile phones during the singing of the national athem on "live" TV...such as Pasir Ris Punggol GRC MP Penny Low.