(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.