Yes, it’s the first of May and we are all celebrating Labour day today! Well, almost everybody in Singapore is celebrating except the common working man. They are busy trying to survive here in super duper expensive Singapore. Looking at all the recent price increases and salary suppression that is going on, I can’t really blame the regular working man. Of course they will be worried. Just look at how much the price of rice has risen and just look at how their salaries have remain stagnant these few years. Oh, yes the government is painting a rosy picture for Singapore, showing that the prices has actually not risen so much, however, the figures shown by the government doesn’t tell the entire story, because they lump everything together. I am sure when you get the figures for the prices of essential goods especially foodstuff, you will see that these prices has risen quite a lot in the recent weeks. And the poor is very dependent on this as they spend a huge portion of their disposable income on essential items. Just imagine a 30% increase in food prices will almost wipe out a low income family’s savings!

And the government had just told the people that it’s not their fault that the price has increased. They blame it on global factors and it is beyond their control. Sure, the global prices of foodstuff has increased but seriously, so has the prices of flats, rental, taxes, fees, fares and many others that the government is controlling and manipulating. If they claim that the price is beyond their control, then they should at least avoid raising these taxes that are in their control. But they don’t. If they reduce these taxes, it will almost certainly help the poor most than it will benefit the rich since the rich don’t spend a huge portion on these. In fact, they spend a lot of their money on high end cars, private 3-story houses, LVs, watches and so on.

Worse still, our beloved government had just claimed that if the people ask for salary upward revisions, the price problem in Singapore will escalate. They claim that if there was an increase in the people’s salaries, prices will be pushed upwards and the people will be worse off than before and this is not the right solution. Of course, they (as in the high ranking government officials) again conveniently forgot that they had recently increased their own salaries by 40%. I wonder what do you guys think of that? Puzzling right? I wonder how greedy and self-serving these elites can be. And the funny thing is, they don’t even have any solution to this problem and being some of the most highly paid multi-million dollar salaried ministers and officials in the world, it is ironic. So, we are still left with ridiculously high prices to deal with and no real solution in sight. We got tons of stupid excuses, ineffective half-assed schemes which benefited the rich more than the poor and nothing more. I wonder why are we paying these government officials so much for doing absolutely nothing?