{"id":84,"date":"2007-02-13T00:45:47","date_gmt":"2007-02-12T16:45:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wp.jiinjoo.com\/?p=84"},"modified":"2007-02-16T11:26:06","modified_gmt":"2007-02-16T03:26:06","slug":"if-i-were-the-finance-minister-of-singapore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.jiinjoo.com\/?p=84","title":{"rendered":"If I were the Finance Minister of Singapore"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.singaporebudget.gov.sg\/budget_2007\/index.html\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Singapore Budget\" title=\"Singapore Budget\" src=\"http:\/\/www.singaporebudget.gov.sg\/budget_2007\/images\/masthead_logo_budget.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Check this out!<\/p>\n<p><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/app.mof.gov.sg\/budget_2007\/choice\/fiscal_choices.asp\"> http:\/\/app.mof.gov.sg\/budget_2007\/choice\/fiscal_choices.asp<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Like the disclaimer said, it&#8217;s totally not scientific, but then it&#8217;s really an awesome education tool for people. The percentage tweaks is, to me, simply just a hand itchy thing for people to hang around the webapp so that they recognize the various major categories of government Profit &#038; Loss.<\/p>\n<p>Here I made the maximum budget advance of $9B which is around 4.71% of the GDP (money greedy finance minister, I am). Sounds kinda puny actually, but I don&#8217;t mind pocketing the difference \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"max-budget-advance.GIF\" id=\"image83\" src=\"http:\/\/wp.jiinjoo.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/02\/max-budget-advance.GIF\" \/><\/div>\n<p>I&#8217;m surprised that MOF actually pays people to do these cute little things. Oh well, whatever drives the IT industry&#8230; There are posters and brochures on the site too.<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center\"><a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.mof.gov.sg\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.singaporebudget.gov.sg\/budget_2007\/images\/logo_mof.gif\" \/><\/a><\/div>\n<p><strong>Updates<\/strong>: The budget is out! Compare answer:<\/p>\n<div style=\"text-align: center\"><img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image86\" alt=\"budget2007-1.gif\" src=\"http:\/\/wp.jiinjoo.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/02\/budget2007-1.gif\" \/> <img decoding=\"async\" id=\"image87\" alt=\"budget2007-2.gif\" src=\"http:\/\/wp.jiinjoo.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/02\/budget2007-2.gif\" \/><\/div>\n<p>As usual, a professionally done source of information, a bit boring in the presentation, but I guess that&#8217;s required of a government (gahmen have to look dead serious). As this is the first time I&#8217;m looking into this, I realize a few weird thing, don&#8217;t know if you find it weird too.<\/p>\n<p>Reference: <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"http:\/\/www.singaporebudget.gov.sg\/budget_2007\/budget_speech\/downloads\/FY2007_Budget_Highlights.pdf\">Budget Highlights<\/a> (pdf)<\/p>\n<p>The countries that Singapore always try to compare to is Hong Kong, Ireland, US, Japan, New Zealand, etc. I mean no offense, but what&#8217;s up with New Zealand? Shouldn&#8217;t Singapore think about comparing to  a wider spread of countries with different circumstances, say, China, Malaysia, Pakistan, Indonesia, or maybe the Argentina, Bhutan and Egypt? None of them are &#8220;off the charts&#8221; since most of the graphical comparison are percentages anyway (e.g. % of GDP spend on government). Or are you telling me that putting a direct comparison between Singapore and Malaysia or Thailand in a financial budget summary with have forward-looking statements like &#8220;Chart 2.1<br \/>\nshows that from the perspectives of both expenditure and revenue, Singapore has one of<br \/>\nthe <strong>leanest<\/strong> governments in the world&#8221; would start an unnecessary PR war on the popular media?<\/p>\n<p>I think it would be worse if the attitude was that Singapore \u6ca1\u6709\u628a\u90bb\u5c45\u770b\u5728\u773c\u91cc (didn&#8217;t put their neighbours in their eyes). Hopefully this is not the reason. Unfortunately I don&#8217;t have energy to find these numbers to do my own comparison&#8230; do you?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Check this out! http:\/\/app.mof.gov.sg\/budget_2007\/choice\/fiscal_choices.asp Like the disclaimer said, it&#8217;s totally not scientific, but then it&#8217;s really an awesome&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-singapore","content-wrap"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.jiinjoo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.jiinjoo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.jiinjoo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jiinjoo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jiinjoo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=84"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jiinjoo.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp.jiinjoo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=84"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jiinjoo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=84"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp.jiinjoo.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=84"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}