The Budget

This year's Budget comes amid a time of great recession. Never before has the growth forecast been revised TWICE in rapid succession before a budget announcement.

Despite that, I'm impressed by the measures put up by the Government in this year's Budget.

The Government's focus on saving jobs is a lot better than welfare schemes: it at gives people something productive to do, and more importantly, gives them a guaranteed income that they have control over. When people are on welfare, they don't spend so much, simply because they don't feel that they have the control over their cashflow. Of course, something has to be done to help those already retrenched, but schemes to help them like workplace training & allowances have already been in place for some time, so it's not worth mentioning them here.

However, it's not very clear whether this would apply to contract workers: they are the most vulnerable to job cuts, since they aren't even permanent staff. Hopefully something can be done to help them.

It's also good that the Government is also looking at the long term issues. Historically, recessions were the best times to make investment, since everything is going at pretty cheap prices.

Once the construction contracts from the boom time are completed and the construction industry gets idle, it would be a good time for the Government to use to make Singapore's infrastructure more elderly friendly.

However, I'm not so sure about having a blanket property tax rebate. Giving the rebate to landlords and encouraging them to pass it on to tenants is essentially giving the landlords money: it's highly unlikely that greedy landlords will pass the savings on, and this was pretty much the case the last few times that this was done.

As it is now, some greedy landlords are still trying to increase prices. Given this, probably a better method might be to put up some sort of rental price control - in principle restricting rental prices to a reasonable price. Landlords would have no choice but to rent out anyway, since the building can't be moved and they still have to maintain and pay property tax for the property.

Anyway, hope that this Budget helps Singapore tide over the recession.