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Just three unanswered questions about Ministerial Salaries
Posted on 05 January 2012
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Because there are too many questions, and too little time.
With everyone cooing and aahing and getting swell and moist about the revised ministerial salaries, New Nation will not add to the cacophony.
All we want to do, is to ask 3 humble and simple questions that everyone might have missed:
1. Take a look at this table showing the National Bonus Matrix, indicating how much bonus ministers can expect to get as part of their pay package.
This is a classic example of Disproportionate Payoff for ministers.
Look at the Green Arrow. If the poorest of the poor in Singapore makes, say, $500 a month now and happens to get a real but mere $10 increment in wages due to a fluke or whatever, that means the poorest of the poor would have achieved a 2% Real Growth Rate.
Now look at the Red Arrow. The ministers, on the other hand, will qualify for a 100 percent bonus Payout Level!
Is that easy money or what?
Is anyone going to bang on about this?
This means, regardless how many times Orchard Road or Bukit Timah floods or how many detainees escape from detention centres or the type of political faux pas ministers commit, as long as they achieve a bare minimum, they will qualify for a bonus if the numbers show it.
2. If the ministers are paid using tax payers’ money, why don’t we know exactly how much each minister gets?Why no published list of salaries? Because we have Asian Confusionist values or we cannot understand an itemised list?
3. The new system proposed is to peg the salaries of ministers to the Top 1,000 Earners, with a 40 percent discount. But is it possible for the annual rate of increment of these Top 1000 earners to be growing so fast that any salary reduction for ministers now will be meaningless in a few years time? So why no data with regards to this again? Because we Singaporeans don’t know how to read graphs?
Fair much?
