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 Back to top 
