Subsidy removal: more questions than answers

After the public relation exercise and biased designed opinion poll that was done at KLCC Convention Center, I spent sometime going through Idris Jala slide presentation which was down loaded from PEMANDU website.

Apart from the many "justification" and "scare tactic" slides, one slide is of particular interest to me. The slide shows that the nation debt has increased steadily from RM 90 bill in 1997 to over 407 in 2010. To find a solution that is reasonable and does not burden the average Joe we need to understand what led to the massive increase in debt. Can we say that the nation financial was badly managed that led to the current state. Bear in mind, the government that was ruling us is the same government all the while. Every child that is born in Malaysia today will shoulder now has to shoulder this debt. The debt that was created by the few elitist.

I expect the media and the experts to question on the snowballing of the nation debt. Since yesterday, I did not see any. Everyone was to focus on the fact that the price of good and services is going up. It is as if that there are no other solutions in sight. No one bothered to ask why the snowballing of debt took place. We have oil from the ground and from the trees and yet we live on debt! Something is seriously wrong somewhere here.

I think we need to address the issue by reducing our nation debt in a structured manner. I had been following the actions of Kevin Rudd the Australian premier in addressing the government expenditure deficit. He has raised the mining tax by another 10%. Going by what is being done in Australia, why can't the government follow the same strategy in certain high income sector like banking?

I hope the people in PM department read blogs. If we can increase our taxation net to a wider area, we should collect more. Right now, this is a major weakness. The government is too dependable on the individual income tax as well as the declared income tax by companies. I have only one issue at this stage on subsidy removal. Why should we burden the ordinary people and increase government coffers for the sake of a few people to abuse it! To solve the current debt problem we need to understand what happened between 1997 and 2010.

rights2write.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/subsidy-removal-more-questions-than-answers/

Tak paham bukak kamus. Gua pun tak paham. Main kopipes je. Haha..