CPF: Fact versus belief, but which will prevail?

The same day (15 Jan 2019) that Manpower Minister Josephine Teo reiterated to Parliament that the CPF payout eligibility age is 65, a Facebook post by Leslie Terh screamed

“Retirement Payout age moved to 70 years quietly…”

adding,

“…if we want to have payout to start at 65, we MUST OPT OUT.”

How cheap food is a national embarrassment

Recently, there have been a spate of news stories extolling cheap hawker meals. Each time I read them, I asked myself, “Why are we doing this? When we celebrate low prices, are we not whitewashing low purchasing power, and by extension, low wages and zero pensions?”

For my first example, let me point to the 6 Jan 2019 story in the Straits Times: Foodcourts in Singapore: Secret to Foodfare’s low prices. Ignore the fact that it was a kind of hagiography to parry criticism of NTUC Foodfare’s take-over of the Kopitiam chain of foodcourts. Embedded in the story was the message: We help Singaporeans because we sell cheap meals.

My second example is drawn from the Mothership website.  On 11 January, its story about a $1 nasi lemak stall sang praises about the woman who held her price steady for 32 years in the name of “customer satisfaction”.

Simplify universal health insurance

The MediShield Life problem faced by Seow Ban Yam may no longer be topical in the news cycle, but it is now when enough facts have emerged that we can see the larger picture instead of being entangled by the details.

MediShield Life is a mandatory health insurance program run by the government.

The outline of the matter can be gleaned from this 31 December 2018 story in the Straits Times:  MediShield Life paid just $4.50 of senior’s $4,477 post-subsidy bill. Since the story is behind a paywall (though the details can also be found here at The Online Citizen), I will set out the gist of the matter here for convenience.

There was once a buffalo here

Making small provisions to enable people to upskill through bite-sized training courses will not be enough to cope with a world in which lifelong continuous learning and career switching has become necessary — I argued this in my previous post Spreading a bit of money to “position Singapore for the future”. But in the interest of length, I left untouched an even bigger question: What if, for all the retraining, adjustments and preparations we make, there simply isn’t enough work to be had? It’s a question that’s not only for Singapore.

Spreading a bit of money to “position Singapore for the future”

Singapore was mentioned favourably in a recent Economist magazine leader.

But the biggest change is to make adult learning routinely accessible to all. One way is for citizens to receive vouchers that they can use to pay for training. Singapore has such “individual learning accounts”; it has given money to everyone over 25 to spend on courses from 500 approved providers. So far each citizen has only a few hundred dollars, but it is early days.

— The Economist, 14 Jan 2017, Learning and earning: Equipping people to stay ahead of technological change

We will probably hear more about this in the coming weeks. The Committee on the Future Economy is supposed to have completed its work by the end of 2016, and anytime now, its report should be released. This committee was tasked to “keep the Singapore economy competitive by helping to position Singapore for the future, as well as identify areas of growth with regard to regional and global developments.”

Did we get more economic growth by giving up our freedoms?

“The Singapore economy outperformed expectations,” reported the Straits Times on 5 January 2017. The economy was said to have expanded by “1.8 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2016 from a year earlier, putting growth for the whole of 2016 at 1.8 per cent, according to advance estimates from the Ministry of Trade and Industry…”

Without questioning how earlier forecasts were developed, the newspaper wrote, “Growth last year was well above MTI’s earlier announced forecast of 1.0 to 1.5 per cent.” I couldn’t but suspect that the ministry had long ago prepared for this day by massaging expectations downwards. I think they do that year after year; it’s getting old. 

Auxiliary thoughts about auxiliary police

A Certis Cisco auxiliary policeman and two neighbourhood vigilantes shooing away foreign workers

The news this week is that Certis Cisco — a fully-owned subsidiary of sovereign wealth fund Temasek Holdings — is hiring Taiwanese for its auxiliary police force. Here are four thoughts that I had, leading on from this key news point. They are: (1) What are the implications of hiring Taiwanese? (2) Why must they be graduates? (3) What are the powers of auxiliary police? (4) Another example of rentier economy? 

Rebuilding from the rubble of 2016 voter-quakes

Pic from BoredPanda/EFE

2016 will be remembered as one of those break-point years when an old order started falling apart. The worrying thing is that there is no sign that any better new order will be born.

Still, 2016 had its uses. The series of victories by what had been unlikely personalities and movements — Rodrigo Duterte winning the Filipino presidency, Brexit, and of course, the Donald Trump victory, have been cathartic. Some good commentary in various media have followed as a result, full of soul-searching and self-criticism.

Tesla: new technologies need new ways of thinking

My mind wanders a lot. There have been idle moments when, presented with a slice of birthday cake on a plastic or paper plate, I have wondered about the environmental-friendliness of the plate. Reading about Joe Nguyen’s travails in getting his Tesla model S licensed in Singapore, I started to wonder about cake on disposable plate again. 

Singapore joins deflation club

Perhaps in other places there might have been headlines screaming ‘deflation’, but here in Singapore, it was just a passing mention in a story about mean incomes, and made to sound like an unequivocally good thing.

Median income, including employer Central Provident Fund contributions, for Singaporeans working full-time grew 6.5 per cent from June 2014 to June last year to reach $3,798. The growth was 7 per cent after adjusting for negative inflation of 0.5 per cent.

— Straits Times, 29 January 2016, Job growth hits 17-year low, but real wages up 7%

See how it slipped in there? ‘Negative inflation’. In other words, deflation.