Sectorial balancing of taxes vs benefits -key to job creatn

When the principle is accepted then and only then we go into the details.

The principles to be considered here should be established:-

Under the current system of governing the country, the annual account presented to parliament for raising of taxes and fees etc are often not accurate; windfall profits made from land sales by SLA and HDB and URA are often concealed by creative accounting.

Yet when government decides to raise taxes like GST from 5% to 7% in 2007, such windfall profits were not disclosed resulting in an undisclosed S$6 billions which should have been reported to prevent the hefty GST increase in 2007 which have resulted in serious inflation of 6%.

Because of recessions in recent years many citizens are still experiencing hardship with dropping wages so new way must be found to help them in avoiding tax and fee increases.

Yet when it comes to funding of such basic and essential services the government was always seen to be dragging its feet to fund them with excuses like "no free lunch" while continuing to hide its billions of profits.

To overcome such problems it is essential to revise the current budgetary process.

All incomes should be disclosed accurately in the annual budgets of the government.

Government must allocate a proper basis for funding of desirable social services like medical care, housing, transportation and utility etc, as in many instances such expenditures should be self-financed from certain specifically related punitive taxes aimed at discouraging certain activities which are interrelated in promotion of social objectives and nation building.

Certain essential services which government was often reluctant to fund out of taxes could in fact be met from such social disincentive taxes.

For example cigarette taxes can be used to fund cancer care or R&D and liquor tax used to administer drink problems.

Windfall profits from SLA and LTA which were not disclosed in annual budget. If properly and honestly disclosed it could have prevented many instances of unnecessary taxing and fee increases in medical care and public transportation or public housing.

This kind of annual parliamentary budget is wrong and unconscienable as it allows the government to hide windfall profits and under-state or misrepresent income in order to keep hoarding monies as has been happening for many years.

Failing to realign to budgetary allocation to desirable social objectives and basic government services to the people, the government will be encouraged again and again to make false claims of deficits in many departments which finally were found to be untruthful because hidden profits made were not reported accurately.

Moreover it will create a situation were the surpluses were lost by the respective department in extravagant expenditures like building unnecessary headquarters for LTA or in overseas investments like Shin Corp.

In view of the afore-stated problems caused by a "no-welfare" governing system, there have been a lot of over-taxing and over-charge of the citizens with under-spending on essential services like medical, housing, utility, transportation etc.

In the first place had such essential services been carefully funded from specific disincentive and sometimes rather punitive taxes like vehicle excise duty, COE, ERP or windfall profits made by GLCs and government agencies we could have avoided such money hoarding which only finally benefited the ministers and civil servants in increasing the salaries ad infinitum despite the private sector experiencing many years of downturns in wages of ordinary workers.

In this way a fairer system could be established to ensure that the desirable social services are linked to and funded from the specific disincentive taxes like vehicle excise, COE ERP or Stamp fee without being sidelined too often by creative accounting.

Note : Defence expenditures can easily be worked out and give a certain priority for funding but properly and fairly balanced against the spending for desirable social services without practical difficulty while preventing such lump-up accounting for being used as an perpetual excuse to forecast deficits or expected deficits which are far from truthful which actually could be aimed at withholding of tax monies for hoarding of surpluses serving very little purposes for ordinary citizens