DPM Tharman once told Parliament that drawing down past reserves was “in essence a conversion of past reserves from one form (financial assets) to another (state land), rather than a drawdown of reserves”.
The above was quoted by Phillip Ang in his latest article on the drawing down of national reserves. In his article Phillip argued that a drawdown is a drawdown. A drawdown of $X billion of cash from the reserves means that this $X billion will be minus from the national reserves, thus the reserves will be lesser by this amount. But according to Tharman's explanation, the drawdown is actually a conversion of one form of reserves to another form, from cash to assets.
Now who is right? Look at this definition on the nation's reserves and the answer is quite clear.
Definition. The Constitution of Singapore defines reserves as “the excess of assets over liabilities of the Government, statutory board or Government company”. The reserves comprise financial assets such as cash and shares as well as physical assets like land and buildings.
Clear? Tharman is absolutely right in this case. Drawing down the reserves to convert them into assets did not reduce the nation's reserves as many idiots in Parliament believed to be so. And as such they are so scare to touch the reserves as it would be a drawdown on the reserves, a frightening thing to do. Now would Tharman do the honour to educate the ignorant boys and girls in Parliament that they are wrong and stop behaving so stupidily talking without knowing what they were talking about?
The conversion of cash reserves is not necessary a depletion of the reserves if the reserves are used to build assets that appreciate in value or could make more profits than the reserves lying inactive as cash and earning a miserable 1% interest. Or worse, if the cash are used in gambling aka investment and loses every cent of it. Converting cash in national reserves into valuable money making assets that make greater returns is not drawing down on the reserves.
The call to draw down the reserves to build T5 and Tuas mega port cannot be a drawdown on the reserves unless these are airy fairy schemes that would lose money. In that case these two white elephants should not be built at all, and the people should not be taxed unnecessary, the govt should not recklessly go around borrowing money to build white elephants. Does anyone disagree that the T5 and Tuas mega port are credible and worthy projects that would appreciate in value and bring in more profits or returns for the money spent? Oops, not money spent but cash reserves converted into asset reserves? If they believe that theses are worthy projects, then what is the problem? Why park the reserves as cash to be used in funny investments that only lose in the hundreds of millions or billions when projects like these could bring in more profits and beneficial to the country? Why defend the using or touching of the reserves so fiercely? Is there other reasons to do so that the people do not know about the state of the reserves?
If Tharman is right, all the nonsense being spouted in Parliament must made the speakers looked silly and they should rightly call for the drawdown of the national reserves to be converted to good money making assets as it would not draw down the reserves. Tiok boh?
All the fools in Parliament defending the drawing down of national reserves to build T5 and Tuas on the false premise that it would draw down the reserves, please kee chiu.
The hysterical and dumbfounded defense of the national reserves from being drawn down is likely to have more unspeakable reasons for doing so, as it is crystal clear that conversion of national reserves into good assets is not a drawdown. It is a plus thing, a positive thing.
5/27/2018
ElderShield - Do no evil
My apologies, I forgot where I copied this from, probably TOC or TREmeritus. Could also be from the main media.
The #ElderShield Review Committee (ESRC) shared their interim recommendations today, after getting feedback from more than 800 #Singaporeans from all walks of life over 26 focus group sessions. To help Singaporeans prepare for their long term care needs, the Committee has recommended that the enhanced ElderShield should be a universal and inclusive scheme for cohorts aged 40 and below when the scheme takes effect. Policyholders will join the scheme from age 30 so they can spread their premiums over a longer period while they are working, to enjoy lifetime coverage after they have grown old and retired. At the start of the enhanced ElderShield scheme, those aged between 31 and 40 will be included as these cohorts are not covered by the existing ElderShield 400 scheme. The ESRC further recommended that the enhanced scheme be administered by the Government as a key pillar of our social safety net. The Committee has also made some useful recommendations on how to make the claims process more accessible and convenient for policyholders and their caregivers.
I welcome the Committee’s interim recommendations. The enhanced ElderShield will enable Singaporeans to pool our risks and resources in preparation for old age, when one faces higher risks of becoming severely disabled. It is an important pillar of #Singapore’s social safety net as our society ages. The Government will look at providing premiums subsidies to keep the premiums affordable for lower and middle-income Singaporeans. This reflects our values in building an inclusive society, where we help and care for one another.
I thank Mr Chaly Mah and the ESRC members for their hard work in engaging different groups of stakeholders and developing their recommendations. We look forward to receiving the Committee’s final recommendations by the middle of this year. -- Hong Tat
I just have one word for these young punks. Do no evil. Stealing the people's life savings without their permission is a very evil thing no matter how it is cloaked or disguised. Remember, retribution will come, it is a matter of when, not if. Look at what is happening to Najib and his cronies and learn to be sincere, honest and really care for the people.
Do not steal the people's life savings. It is their money, they earned by their sweat, blood and tears.
Any govt that have designs on the people's life savings and started to steal the people's life savings has lost its moral authority to rule. The mandate of heaven would soon be taken away from them. Malaysia is a case in point. And many of the accomplices of crimes against the people would be brought to justice and live in shame when the day arrives.
The #ElderShield Review Committee (ESRC) shared their interim recommendations today, after getting feedback from more than 800 #Singaporeans from all walks of life over 26 focus group sessions. To help Singaporeans prepare for their long term care needs, the Committee has recommended that the enhanced ElderShield should be a universal and inclusive scheme for cohorts aged 40 and below when the scheme takes effect. Policyholders will join the scheme from age 30 so they can spread their premiums over a longer period while they are working, to enjoy lifetime coverage after they have grown old and retired. At the start of the enhanced ElderShield scheme, those aged between 31 and 40 will be included as these cohorts are not covered by the existing ElderShield 400 scheme. The ESRC further recommended that the enhanced scheme be administered by the Government as a key pillar of our social safety net. The Committee has also made some useful recommendations on how to make the claims process more accessible and convenient for policyholders and their caregivers.
I welcome the Committee’s interim recommendations. The enhanced ElderShield will enable Singaporeans to pool our risks and resources in preparation for old age, when one faces higher risks of becoming severely disabled. It is an important pillar of #Singapore’s social safety net as our society ages. The Government will look at providing premiums subsidies to keep the premiums affordable for lower and middle-income Singaporeans. This reflects our values in building an inclusive society, where we help and care for one another.
I thank Mr Chaly Mah and the ESRC members for their hard work in engaging different groups of stakeholders and developing their recommendations. We look forward to receiving the Committee’s final recommendations by the middle of this year. -- Hong Tat
I just have one word for these young punks. Do no evil. Stealing the people's life savings without their permission is a very evil thing no matter how it is cloaked or disguised. Remember, retribution will come, it is a matter of when, not if. Look at what is happening to Najib and his cronies and learn to be sincere, honest and really care for the people.
Do not steal the people's life savings. It is their money, they earned by their sweat, blood and tears.
Any govt that have designs on the people's life savings and started to steal the people's life savings has lost its moral authority to rule. The mandate of heaven would soon be taken away from them. Malaysia is a case in point. And many of the accomplices of crimes against the people would be brought to justice and live in shame when the day arrives.
Sino Indian border war - A revelation of unpleasant truth still guarded as state secret
Two weeks ago, the Australian journalist
Neville Maxwell
finally made part of the Henderson Brooks report
public, by putting it up on his blog. The report was an internal Indian
Army enquiry into its rout in the 1962 war with China — Maxwell was the
New Delhi correspondent for The Times, London, at the time — but in the
51 years since the report was written up by Lt Gen Henderson Brooks
and Brig PS Bhagat, successive Indian governments have refused to make
it public. Only two copies of the report were thought to be in
existence, although there was never any doubt that Maxwell had had
access to the report for his 1970 book India's China War quoted
extensively from it. In his first interview to the Indian media since he
made the report public, the now 88-year-old Maxwell tells
Parakram Rautela
that he had been trying to make the report public for years but that
nobody would publish it. He adds that he was only able to get hold of
Volume I of the report, minus 45 pages, and that he never laid eyes on
Volume II. And of course he still blames Nehru for the war, not the
Chinese. Excerpts:
Q: You suggest India's official account of the cause of the 1962 border war is false. What, in your view, is the truth?
NM: By September 1962 the Indian "forward policy" of trying to force the Chinese out of territory India claimed had built up great tension in the Western (Ladakh) sector of the border, with the Chinese army just blocking it. Then the Nehru government applied the forward policy to the McMahon Line eastern sector and when the Chinese blocked that too India in effect declared war with Nehru's announcement on October 11 that the Army had been ordered to "free our territory", which meant to attack the Chinese and drive them back. As General Niranjan Prasad, commander of 4 Division, wrote later: "We at the front knew that since Nehru had said he was going to attack, the Chinese were certainly not going to wait to be attacked" — and of course they didn't. That's how the war began. The Chinese attack was both reactive, in that General Kaul had begun the Indian assault on October 10, and pre-emptive because after that failure the Indian drive had been suspended to build up strength for a resumed attack....
While India continues to tell its lies that it was the victim of Chinese aggression and continues to blame the Chinese for the 1962 border war, more and more information are being disclosed by independent authors using classified India documents to prove who was the real devil in the conflict.
Deny as much as they want to deceive their own people and people of the war, the aggressive and hostile nature of the Indian govt have not changed since then, with wild ambitions to be a world power, to the extend of harbouring intention of seizing Chinese land and controlling its neighbouring states as protectorates and colonies, elevating itself as a regional hegemon.
The facts speak for itself. The so called Chinese intent to grab Indian land sounded hollow when the Chinese soldiers withdrew from India after the counter offensive, released all prisoners of war, returned all weapons captured, and returned to the original line of control...till today.
Q: You suggest India's official account of the cause of the 1962 border war is false. What, in your view, is the truth?
NM: By September 1962 the Indian "forward policy" of trying to force the Chinese out of territory India claimed had built up great tension in the Western (Ladakh) sector of the border, with the Chinese army just blocking it. Then the Nehru government applied the forward policy to the McMahon Line eastern sector and when the Chinese blocked that too India in effect declared war with Nehru's announcement on October 11 that the Army had been ordered to "free our territory", which meant to attack the Chinese and drive them back. As General Niranjan Prasad, commander of 4 Division, wrote later: "We at the front knew that since Nehru had said he was going to attack, the Chinese were certainly not going to wait to be attacked" — and of course they didn't. That's how the war began. The Chinese attack was both reactive, in that General Kaul had begun the Indian assault on October 10, and pre-emptive because after that failure the Indian drive had been suspended to build up strength for a resumed attack....
While India continues to tell its lies that it was the victim of Chinese aggression and continues to blame the Chinese for the 1962 border war, more and more information are being disclosed by independent authors using classified India documents to prove who was the real devil in the conflict.
Deny as much as they want to deceive their own people and people of the war, the aggressive and hostile nature of the Indian govt have not changed since then, with wild ambitions to be a world power, to the extend of harbouring intention of seizing Chinese land and controlling its neighbouring states as protectorates and colonies, elevating itself as a regional hegemon.
The facts speak for itself. The so called Chinese intent to grab Indian land sounded hollow when the Chinese soldiers withdrew from India after the counter offensive, released all prisoners of war, returned all weapons captured, and returned to the original line of control...till today.
5/26/2018
China –The world ‘s biggest consumer market beckons
The stereotyping of communist countries as poor and backward
agricultural societies is over. Though this reality is as clear a bright
sunlight, many that have lived under the western media’s condemnation
and smear campaign of communist countries and communism would still
swear, with their eyes wide open, that communism and communist countries
are the poor and backward bad guys. The blinkers should have fallen off
long ago, but these daft and unthinking beans would put them back on
and keep on swearing at communism and communist countries.
China, with its 1.36b population is now the second largest economy and the world’s largest consumer market with at least 600m people that are middle class and with the spending power to match. They are hungry consumers for all the good things in life that money can buy. They buy them in China and the rest of the world as big spender tourists. Yes, they are communists, or from a communist regime that the West have branded as bad and evil. The one century of indoctrination and western propaganda is hard to shrug off, worse for the unthinking kind.
Be nice to the world’s biggest consumer market or you will have to face the consequences. The little white sheriff still thinks it is an European state and sided with the evil American Empire to be an enemy of China. China is closing its market to this little white rogue and it is crying in pain. China should persist in keeping this little rogue in its little corner of the world, not allowing its goods access to its market, not allowing its citizens to visit and spend money in Australia. Keep it that way for another 10 years and see how long it will last in its anti China and racist way.
The Americans started a trade war, fired the few first shots. Now it is thinking twice. Without the world’s biggest consumer market, many of American products would find no buyers. The agricultural produce would go to waste. The automobile companies, the aircraft industries, the high tech industries, including Apple would have its sales figures slashed. GM and Ford Motors would go belly up.
The same fate would apply to the European companies. They need trade, they need to sell their goods and services. And who have the money and the willingness to buy them? The rich communist Chinese in China. Any country that wants to sell their goods better be nice to the communists in China. They have the money, not 1.36 b of poverty stricken peasants anymore. They are travelling the world, strutting around with pockets full of cash.
Deny and defy the biggest economy and biggest consumer market in the world at your own risk. Without China buying, without the Chinese buying and spending their hard earned money, the world economy would have gone into a recession. Many European countries and their companies, including Americans, would go bankrupt without the consumers in China.
This is the new reality. Remove your blinkers, dafties. This is the brave new world of the 21st Century.
China should not just shut its door to Australia, it should do the same to a few of the rogue European countries like France, Holland and Italy and also Canada. Without the biggest consumer market in the world, and the second biggest market closing its door to them by Trump, these rogue countries would go bankrupt very soon. China should just do it, don't buy from them, don't trade with them. Pick a few like the saying, kill the chicken to frighten the monkeys.
China, with its 1.36b population is now the second largest economy and the world’s largest consumer market with at least 600m people that are middle class and with the spending power to match. They are hungry consumers for all the good things in life that money can buy. They buy them in China and the rest of the world as big spender tourists. Yes, they are communists, or from a communist regime that the West have branded as bad and evil. The one century of indoctrination and western propaganda is hard to shrug off, worse for the unthinking kind.
Be nice to the world’s biggest consumer market or you will have to face the consequences. The little white sheriff still thinks it is an European state and sided with the evil American Empire to be an enemy of China. China is closing its market to this little white rogue and it is crying in pain. China should persist in keeping this little rogue in its little corner of the world, not allowing its goods access to its market, not allowing its citizens to visit and spend money in Australia. Keep it that way for another 10 years and see how long it will last in its anti China and racist way.
The Americans started a trade war, fired the few first shots. Now it is thinking twice. Without the world’s biggest consumer market, many of American products would find no buyers. The agricultural produce would go to waste. The automobile companies, the aircraft industries, the high tech industries, including Apple would have its sales figures slashed. GM and Ford Motors would go belly up.
The same fate would apply to the European companies. They need trade, they need to sell their goods and services. And who have the money and the willingness to buy them? The rich communist Chinese in China. Any country that wants to sell their goods better be nice to the communists in China. They have the money, not 1.36 b of poverty stricken peasants anymore. They are travelling the world, strutting around with pockets full of cash.
Deny and defy the biggest economy and biggest consumer market in the world at your own risk. Without China buying, without the Chinese buying and spending their hard earned money, the world economy would have gone into a recession. Many European countries and their companies, including Americans, would go bankrupt without the consumers in China.
This is the new reality. Remove your blinkers, dafties. This is the brave new world of the 21st Century.
China should not just shut its door to Australia, it should do the same to a few of the rogue European countries like France, Holland and Italy and also Canada. Without the biggest consumer market in the world, and the second biggest market closing its door to them by Trump, these rogue countries would go bankrupt very soon. China should just do it, don't buy from them, don't trade with them. Pick a few like the saying, kill the chicken to frighten the monkeys.
5/25/2018
Stubborn Mahathir just refuses to learn
Don’t teach an old dog new tricks. Mahathir just announced a 10% cut in
ministerial salary. His own salary will be cut from MR 22,826 to RM
20,540. His ministers’ salary would be from RM14,907 to RM 13,416.
Anyone knows how miserable is RM 20,540? It is less than S$7,000pm. How
to survive like that? The quality of life of his family members would be
gravely affected. And his ministers’s RM 13,416 is less than S$5,000.
Does he know how much is our PM and ministers getting a day?
My God, any average Singaporean will have a household income of more than S$5,000. Many household incomes here are more than S$7,000. This means than many Singaporeans are earning more than Mahathir, the PM of Malaysia. This is really injustice. No dignity.
Does Mahathir really think his ministers can survive with such a miserable salary? Does he know that human beans are corrupt by nature and if he does not pay them multi million dollar salaries they will definitely become corrupt? This human nature is universal.
Singapore’s govt understand this and have solved this problem by paying their ministers in the millions to prevent them from becoming corrupt. When Hsien Loong visited him, did he not see the shining example of a incorruptible PM and his cabinet of equally incorruptible ministers? Should he have learnt something?
Instead of raising his ministers’ salaries to the millions, he made them take a 10% pay cut! He is really asking for trouble. They will become corrupt for sure. Like that Malaysia would be in more trouble. His govt would become more corrupt than Najib’s. At least Najib tried to pay them well.
This old dog is too stubborn and refuses to learn from Singapore. On second thought, how could he learn from Singapore? He detests everything Singapore. He is trying to prove the impossible, that low minister salaries would not lead to corruption. I am sure he will surely fail. He does not understand human nature. Greed is good. He also does not know that to lead a quality life, you must have million dollar salary. The peasants can tighten their belts, but how can he expects his ministers to tighten their belts and live like paupers?
Malaysia jiat lat leow.
My God, any average Singaporean will have a household income of more than S$5,000. Many household incomes here are more than S$7,000. This means than many Singaporeans are earning more than Mahathir, the PM of Malaysia. This is really injustice. No dignity.
Does Mahathir really think his ministers can survive with such a miserable salary? Does he know that human beans are corrupt by nature and if he does not pay them multi million dollar salaries they will definitely become corrupt? This human nature is universal.
Singapore’s govt understand this and have solved this problem by paying their ministers in the millions to prevent them from becoming corrupt. When Hsien Loong visited him, did he not see the shining example of a incorruptible PM and his cabinet of equally incorruptible ministers? Should he have learnt something?
Instead of raising his ministers’ salaries to the millions, he made them take a 10% pay cut! He is really asking for trouble. They will become corrupt for sure. Like that Malaysia would be in more trouble. His govt would become more corrupt than Najib’s. At least Najib tried to pay them well.
This old dog is too stubborn and refuses to learn from Singapore. On second thought, how could he learn from Singapore? He detests everything Singapore. He is trying to prove the impossible, that low minister salaries would not lead to corruption. I am sure he will surely fail. He does not understand human nature. Greed is good. He also does not know that to lead a quality life, you must have million dollar salary. The peasants can tighten their belts, but how can he expects his ministers to tighten their belts and live like paupers?
Malaysia jiat lat leow.
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