Thanks to those who has voted. Although there were only 29 votes (probably due to many similar polls), the results were a little different to that conducted by Straits Times (ST).
50% in ST felt that the budget definitely did not meet their expectations but only 34% readers here share the same sentiments. The next largest group here felt that the budget could have been better contrary to ST where their next largest group felt that it did not really meet their expectations.
I'm not surprised by the results - I expected most people to be reasonably satisfied with budget but I can't explain why the results vary from that conducted in ST. The only explanation that I can come out now is readers here are probably more financially savvy and understand economics more.
On an interesting note, the number of votes in "definitely did not meet expectation" went up when the parliament started debating on the budget.
[caption id="attachment_11325" align="alignnone" width="591" caption="Poll Singapore Budget 2011"]
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19 Feb 2011
Straits Times conducted a
similar poll and almost 50% of the readers felt that the budget did not meet their expectations at all. This is a huge surprise for me considering that this budget is so much better than last year. I wonder if readers here share the same sentiments. Hence, I created a almost similar poll.
I am thinking that most votes will fall in "Could have been better" but I may be wrong. What do you think?
One aspect of the budget which I find lacking is the the incentive to have babies. With the declining birth rate, more could have been done like increasing baby bonus.
Since I knew it was an Election Budget, I guess I was kind of disgusted by how money was being given out to win votes. And yes, not enough was done to alleviate the burdens of bringing up a child. Adding $400 to a child’s CDA is less than peanuts – it cannot even cover 1 month of childcare fees, milk powder and diapers! And there were no other incentives to encourage couples to have more babies.
And the extra 0.5% increase in Employer’s CPF was added to SA and not OA. With housing prices rising so fast, the least they could do was to channel the $ to OA to help to pay for the housing loan.
The problem is I sort of have the feeling all these “goodies” will be clawed back in other forms once the Election is over. Higher GST, higher bus/MRT fares, higher medical costs and other measures will ensure the extra money is taken back in one way or another.
More cld be done to alleviate the high healthcare cost and runaway price of public housing.No pt keep pushing up wages when price of public housing keeps galloping away as this means that our gds and svcs will not be competitive.