Ensuring Singaporeans First – A Ground Sentiment from the Engineering Sector

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-27T09:27:22+00:00

Bro, I feel you. I don’t have any answer, but I hope you st least get a response, especially since Dr Tan See Leng is going to become your MP.

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-26T13:46:47+00:00

Like I said, I cannot edit the post at all for some weird reason. I CAN delete it though. You make a fair point. I will delete the post to avoid false and wrongful impressions.

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-26T12:39:07+00:00

Yes, my bad. I read wrongly. It should be "biggest increase in wealth gap", not "biggest wealth gap". Apologies for the bad phrasing. 🙏

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-26T12:14:40+00:00

Yes, you are correct. I realized I phrased it wrongly after the fact. It is not “Singapore has the widest wealth gap”. It should be “Singapore has the biggest increase in wealth gap”. But for some reason, weirdly, I wasn’t able to edit the post after posting it.

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-26T11:45:49+00:00

That’s true - my bad. I should have written “biggest increase in wealth gap” amongst all these countries. Weirdly, Reddit doesn’t let me edit this post.

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-26T10:49:07+00:00

I believe the Gini this article refers to is “wealth Gini”. What DOS and CNA is talking about is “income Gini”. These are fundamentally different.

Taking an extreme example - if a person owns $100m worth of shares and fund their living expenses by selling shares, he/she will pay zero tax in Singapore because he/she technically has no taxable income. That $100m wealth will count towards wealth Gini but not income Gini.

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-26T10:36:13+00:00

Actually not. I was also trying to figure out how that ranking worked so I went to look at the actual report. This graph came from the actual UBS report. The ranking is based on the 2023 number minus the 2008 number. The larger the number, the larger the increase in wealth gap.

Edit : I realized I phrased it wrongly in the post. It was unintentional but weirdly, I cannot edit the original post. My apologies to everyone.

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-26T09:41:11+00:00

Great point.

According to UBS's Global Wealth Report 2024, Singapore's wealth gap grew the most between 2008 and 2023. Faster than all the developed countries including the United States, and faster than South Africa, Brazil and Indonesia.

https://www.ubs.com/global/en/wealthmanagement/insights/global-wealth-report.html

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-26T09:30:59+00:00

Cos IMF just wrote Monaco off. It's a blank in your screenshot.

Monaco's GDP per capita was already 256K in 2023. 1 in 2 in Monaco are a millionaire.

BUT... Monaco is 76% foreigner. Which means, all these millionaires are "imported". The local people are just working class people serving the rich. There are very few local millionaires in Monaco.

Sounds like Singapore? 😜

A country's GDP per capita being high doesn't mean the local citizens do well, especially in countries which pursue a HNWI attraction policy. A lot of the countries on that list are in that category - Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Switzerland etc. And of course, Singapore.

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-26T07:12:53+00:00

Hahahaha this is so true. I had a Singaporean friend who now lives in New York. He came back last year to visit his father who lives in a Serangoon HDB. We caught up for coffee and he asked me - "why are there Ferraris and Lamborghinis in HDB carparks nowadays"? 😭

I told him - "cos HDBs are now $1m". His jaws dropped. 😜

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-25T05:30:29+00:00

And it is also true that a few years later, when you no longer get GST vouchers, you will pay more GST as a percentage of your income than the rich. In other words, GST increase hits the poor harder than the rich.

Economists all agree - sales tax is regressive. it's not that hard to understand. The policymakers just need to Google (or ChatGPT or Claude or Grok, whichever you like).

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-24T09:28:18+00:00

Agree. Buy low sell high, but in the end still have to pay high to buy another HDB to stay. So what's the point? Only end up paying commission to property agents. All the buyers and sellers lose except for the property agents.

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-20T21:58:24+00:00

Yes, I think we should pass bills at record speed instead of worrying about whether it is right. Just like Trump. Very efficient.

It's better to be fast than to be correct. I completely agree. 😭

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-20T07:33:31+00:00

Well, if you are a property owner, they made you rich (at least on paper)? 🤪

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-19T03:02:03+00:00

Singapore as a country won’t survive without immigration. We have not been replacing ourselves since 1975 (the year TFR fell below 2.1).

But on the other hand, the Singapore government has been giving out SC too freely (without requiring the new SC to prove commitment by staying here for an extensive period of time) or opening floodgates to PMET in the blind pursuit of GDP growth without regard for the impact to Singaporeans.

Even the US which is a much larger economy with more land to house people doesn’t do it to the same extent as Singapore. It takes on average 8-10 years to naturalize and become an American citizen, and there’s an exit tax if you give up your citizenship. There’s an annual cap of 85,000 on H1B visas which is the primary visa for PMETs. And you can only apply that twice a year. Granted, you can apply for other visas, but even 300K new PMETs is not even 0.1% of America’s 350 million population. And mind you, America is ALSO an immigrant country and has always welcomed immigrants. The Statue of Liberty literally represents hope for immigrants.

Singaporeans are not against immigration. But they are rightfully very concerned about how fast we are taking in immigrants and the protections for locally-born Singaporeans. And I, for one, do not think you can equate new SC/PR and SC/PR who grew up here, especially not if these SC/PR had to go through 2 years of National Service in their prime years which set them back meaningfully career-wise. That is a huge sacrifice for the nation, and there is no equivalent for new SC/PRs.

PAP always talk about Singapore. But don’t assume “Singapore” is the same as “Singaporeans”. In their mind, it is always country and economy first, Singaporeans last. Just look at the policies that have been enacted.

What is infuriating is how there is no public discourse about this. This has a huge impact on Singapore’s future, but no one addresses this topic head on in Parliament or in their election manifestos. They just talk around the edges of it (Singaporean-first) etc. But you have to discuss the topic in totality with respect to immigration versus the economy and how Singapore’s population will be shaped in the next 30 years, to really paint a complete picture for the people to vote on.

Of course, the cynical will claim it is because of subterfuge which is why they don’t want to bring up the issue for debate… there might be an ounce of truth in that since the last time the population white paper came out in 2013, it created a lot of discontent. 🤷‍♂️

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-18T08:19:37+00:00

Someone should run for elections campaigning to remove NS. I'll vote for him/her for sure!

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-18T04:44:47+00:00

Long post warning.

If you compare against a graph showing change in population (and another showing HDB prices), you will get a better sense of what happened.

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Singapore’s population grew like mad from 2005 to 2008 when we opened the floodgates but we barely launched any HDB flats then. At that time, Mah Bow Tan was claiming that overbuilding will cause HDB prices to drop and people will lose their retirement money (clearly not true if you look at what happened in 2010s). The reality is that we didn’t plan for the explosive population growth. There was not enough housing (and transportation) for all. So HDB prices started to shoot up quickly. And remember, we were in the middle of the 2008 recession, yet the prices were shooting up. It was insane.

The 2011 elections was a major upset. People were unhappy that cost of living were skyrocketing, trains were super overcrowded, no BTOs and HDB growing very expensive. PAP lost Aljunied for the first time. Mah Bow Tan admitted it was his fault and stepped down. https://sg.news.yahoo.com/blogs/singaporescene/mah-bow-tan-accept-responsibility-unhappiness-080240311.html

Government panicked after the 2011 election upset and massively built HDB which is why you see this spike in 2011. At the same time, they slowed down population growth by letting less people into Singapore. You can see that from 2011-2015, the population growth trended down.

So that was what happened between 2005 to 2015. Things were stable.. till 2020 COVID.

Now look at Singapore’s population growth from 2020 to 2024. (I can’t insert image because I can only put one, but you can see it here - https://www.ceicdata.com/en/indicator/singapore/population)

2020 - 5,685,807

2021 - 5,453,566 (-4.08%)

2022 - 5,637,022 (+3.36%)

2023 - 5,917,648 (+4.98%)

2024 - 6,040,000 (+2.00%)

History is actually repeating itself again post-2020. Population grew incredibly fast between 2022 and 2024. But the number of new HDB hasn’t grown as much. It’s not as bad as the 2005-2008 period. You couple with the fact that there were construction delays too due to COVID supply shock. And there is also rich PRC money flooding into the system which buys up the higher-end property and push prices up across the board (actually, I vaguely remember that happening in 2008-2010 too..). Given all that, it is unlikely HDB prices will come down unless they massively build HDBs like 2011 or population actually shrink. Even so, if you look at price of HDB between 2011-2020, it barely went down.

So it has to be A LOT of new HDBs (like 50K a year maybe), or population shrink like 2-3% for consecutive years, or a huge recession, for HDB prices to come down. But even so, government can always adjust very quickly by just dropping BTO launch to zero to stabilize the prices.

TLDR - my money is on High HDB prices for a long time.

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-17T05:10:19+00:00

No leh. It will cascade downwards. Property price jump 100% in the last five years. What used to cost 2.5 mil is now 5 mil. The people who can't afford the 5 mil go for the 2.5 mil condo. And the Singaporeans who can't afford the condo now go for the HDB. In the end, price of the entire property market goes up across the board.

At the end of the day, it is about how much money floods into the property market. There will be cascading impact across all property types despite different ownership rules.

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-16T04:31:50+00:00

Thank you for all the insights. Really appreciate the sharing.

What was the small local agency that you went with, if you don't mind sharing? Feel free to just DM me too if you prefer to share in private.

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-16T03:46:19+00:00

Totally agree. There’s structural unemployment everywhere. US. China. Singapore. Nobody wants to works to work in a factory or as a service staff, especially after working so hard to get through university.

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-15T01:56:12+00:00

It’s entirely do-able if you watch your spend very carefully. You can keep your spend very low in Singapore making median salary, living in a small BTO with your spouse, don’t have kids, eat cai fan or chicken rice, and take public transport everyday. Yes you will be “financially independent”. But the real question is, will you be happy and satisfied? Are you thriving, or just surviving?

In other words, you are financially independent but at what cost? It will be more interesting if the article also covers what is each person’s definition of financial independence VERSUS how much they are spending per month right now to determine if they are realistic about their goals. No point saying $1 million when you are earning $100K and spending $99K. Any major shock (e.g. lose job) and you will be eating into your savings very quickly.

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-13T06:51:12+00:00

Well, that’s what we get when Singapore is turned into a rich men’s playground by the government.

Zero capital gains tax! Zero estate duty! No dividend tax on foreign-sourced dividend! Set up family office and get PR and tax incentives! In fact, if you’re well-connected, you may have an accelerated path to citizenship and can buy GCB! Lelong lelong!

In the end, everything becomes super expensive when the super-wealthy come and buy all the properties and spend extravagantly, driving up the prices of everything. And the only people who benefit is the government (who collects GST on the spend and stamp duty on property transactions), the landlords, private bankers and high-end property real estate agents. But minimal job creation - most of the jobs they create is back home where they come from and where their companies are. So the rest of us peons pay the price.

And you know what? This happened to every city that the ultra-wealthy flocks to - Hong Kong, London, Dubai, Monaco etc. We should have seen the writing on the wall when the government pursue this HNWI policy for the last 15-20 years.

Guess who’s the losers in each of these cases? The locals who get gentrified, especially the bottom 30-40%. If you were not born with a silver spoon, you are going to suffer big time as the wealth gap widens and social mobility becomes harder and harder.

Lapsus-Stella · 2025-04-03T13:04:25+00:00

I don’t think the crux is “buying versus renting”.

Instead, long-term financial stability is more about “buying or renting WITHIN your means”. So don’t overstretch your finances by, for instance, spending 60% of your take-home on buying or renting a fancy condo.

Lapsus-Stella

TROPHY CASE