(As posted on 9.11.06 at www.findsingapore.net/forum)
You have confirmed my earlier post regarding double charge on land and corporation leading to our present high costs of living.
Originally taxpayers' monies were used to set up the original TCS and licence fees collected but under the clever corporatization scheme such instructures were passed to GLCs i.e. MediaCorp and Mediawork some years ago, with the accumulated icence fees conveniently absorbed by Media Authority.
Such infrastructures belonged to the taxpayers and should have been retained for operations and program funding and taxpayers should not have to pay to MediaCorp and Mediawork higher charges to cover such costs already paid.
The whole corporatizations of essential public services end up with taxpayers on the losing side. The taxpayers not only have to pay for the higher CEO salaries of MediaCorp but have to pay for all the government ministers and MPs taking up prime TV times at the expense of commericial advertisements at millions per year. On top of all these people need to pay for more expensive furnishing, the land and whole set-up costs already paid by them previously all over again.
No wonder MediaCorp and Mediawork had to lose multi-millions in the few years after corporatization with the ministers conveniently putting the blame for their losses on small size of populations to support two media.
The root cause of the perpetual rising costs of living is greed. Since the 1970s all kinds of methods have been attempted from creative accounting, to double-charge on lands and infrastructure costs and corporatization to hyper-salary and self-reward resulting in higher and higher costs citizens have to pay to keep the government running.
There is a loss of control and there is today still no admission of such a loss of economic competitiveness due to such tax-and-recover high-handed policies of the ministers, MPs, civil servants and GLC elites.