Powered by glolg
Display Preferences Most Recent Entries Chatterbox Blog Links Site Statistics Category Tags About Me, Myself and Gilbert XML RSS Feed
Sunday, Apr 02, 2017 - 19:12 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Hope No Change

"What we generally call participation in the political process, [the intellectual-yet-idiot] calls by two distinct designations: 'democracy' when it fits [him], and 'populism' when the plebs dare voting in a way that contradicts his preferences..."

- Taleb, on the hypocrisy of "informed liberals"
(many still delusional about Rubio/Kasich [?!] winning...)


Well, it seems as if Dr. Tan Cheng Bock's Tuesday luncheon might have led up to something. A few days after that, he would call upon the government to open up the forthcoming Presidential election at a press conference, by raising the technicality that since Mr. Ong Teng Cheong is widely [correctly] considered as our first elected president, and the new Constitutional changes provide for reserved elections only after five terms, this should apply only to the next elections.

Of course, exactly nothing will come of this appeal, since the amendments were obviously tailored to keep him - and others like him - from entering the running, as our Master Political Analyst hamster explained in some depth last September. And, in this case, the government would be right to ignore him - reiterating, since it has already come to this, it's probably best for everyone concerned to just suck it up for now.

And anyway, even were his argument accepted, it's not like Dr. Tan would qualify given the new $$$ eligibility criteria, which clever observers have noted as being the real killer, with race being slyly employed as a convenient distracting smokescreen; with precedent now established for limiting eligibility to the CEOs of a tiny handful of giant (and either government-linked or politically-vulnerable) companies, this requirement will silently shut out far more candidates than the much more publicized racial reservations, since it would apply even to open elections, going forward.

This farce could have been slightly easier to take, had the incumbents not blatantly rubbed it in by addressing their presumptive chosen nominee as "Madam Presidente" in Parliament - and not once, but twice (then again, as trolling goes, not too bad, I suppose); joking aside, though, this implicit withdrawal of voting rights is very much Not A Good Sign - civil rights and liberties, once yielded (and generally for the worse), tend to be extremely difficult to regain.


We support strong women candidates, but they *must* be elected;
Vive la France, Le Pen is mightier than De Word!
(Sources: plus.google.com, knowyourmeme.com, marine2017.fr)
[N.B. Her fraternal comrades over at r/the_donald are selflessly lending their support to r/le_pen, and let's face it, there are many similarities]


No, you see, the incumbents want to have their popiah and eat it too: to retain the trappings of democracy, while not actually having to practise it (come to think of it, for all the criticism it gets, why does everyone - including Kim's North Korea and Saddam's Iraq, etc - bother so much with maintaining a democratic facade?)

Sure, they can draw straws and have Shanmugam or Teo put on their best stern face and browbeat outnumbered dissenters in Parliament with accusations of impugning and casting aspersions thereof, but frankly, there's a limit to which this bullying nonsense can be taken, lah. While I can understand why the incumbents went down this road, I have to warn that playing punk with democracy is very bad in the longer term... but it's not like they have that stellar a track record on that.

On that, recall the perennial HDB/CPF issue, which last entrenched itself in the public consciousness a few years ago via The Heart Truths, which has since largely been sued into submission? Well, as we have examined back in 2014, while Ngerng might have gone overboard on a few of his accusations, the main point should have been that the main thrust of his macroeconomic analysis was broadly accurate.

Anyway, a week or so ago, our National Development Minister has suddenly found it necessary to remind the populace not to assume that all old HDB flats will be SERS-ed. Given this, I feel that it is a good time to reproduce an illustrative figure that we produced, back in 2012, inspired by Yawning Bread's classic piece on the HDB bubble, a year before that:


Now five more years down the road...


From my observations, the deprecation has not quite been priced in yet, largely as almost all flats remain a few decades off the "zone of pain" - where CPF cannot be used to help fund the purchase of the flat, due to the remaining lease being 30 years or less. That said, many flats are already beginning the transition, with age-based restrictions kicking in once the remaining lease is 60 years or less (i.e. built before 1978). Still, this hasn't dissuaded some buyers, whose thought process generally appears to remain "the value will keep going up" (thanks, incumbent party propaganda department)

As it is, the government of the day appears to have settled on a response to Alex Au's warning of a S$270 billion bailout - no guaranteed SERS, thus no mandatory bailout required (in the same vein as the lack of guarantees for the CPF itself). Problem solved!

Of course, it likely wouldn't make sense to promise a bailout, even if it were their intention, so vague statements of this form were always the most probable policy. Thing is, this is coming from an administration that was singing "asset appreciation" at full voice, not a decade ago. Well, I'll just say that it's one thing to talk about no SERS now, and another altogether to stick to it twenty years down the road, when a large segment of the population starts to discover that they're actually bleeding money on their main (forced) investment...

The obvious and direct mitigation is population growth, which continues to be milked for all it's worth, but an ongoing realisation is the seeming lack of a consistent overarching vision; on one end, we have a former cheerleader for "asset appreciation" now weeping about manpower and not jobs being the bottleneck, which many have justifiably interpreted as a prelude to (yet again) importing more foreign workers, which however has consistently depressed productivity... and wait, wasn't it just 2015 when we were still "transitioning towards a manpower-lean economy driven by productivity"? Also, why is increased productivity leading to our former labour chief advising citizens to be prepared to retire later?

Might as well laugh at the clusterf**k, while I still can...


The best timeline, guaranteed
(Source: cbsnews.com)




comments (0) - email - share - print - direct link
trackbacks (0) - trackback url


Next: Filler Piece


Related Posts:
Pure Punditry
Incumbent Investigations
The Week After
Nine-Eight-Fifty-Fifty
Our Hamster Conversation
Back to top

Copyright © 2006-2025 GLYS. All Rights Reserved.