Singapore must never allow politics to become so divided we lose ability to work together: PM Wong

The climate goal is basically piling an 800% to 1,500% carbon tax hike (from S$5 up to S$45–S$80) to force net-zero by 2050, baking in inflation to artificially prop up growth metrics and justify their own relevance at our expense, while other governments actually protect energy affordability for their own people.
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The PM keeps talking about strengthening the &quot;bonds of trust and unity&quot; among us, but pegging political salaries to the Top 1000 earners does the exact opposite. It creates an unreasonable &quot;top supreme&quot; financial class even despite falling performance. The base is already the world&#39;s highest, meaning their baseline compensation remains permanently insulated from the public&#39;s real-world unhappiness, seen in rising mental health issues and a crashing TFR.
<br>Furthermore, hiding behind GDP is a flawed defense. GDP measures total economic spending, not what everyday citizens actually earn or whether they are genuinely happy and prosperous.
<br>If ministers want to talk about unity, they must end this self-serving insulation. Tie political rewards directly to the actual take-home income and well-being of the ordinary citizens they are supposed to serve.

When 191 private property transactions worth $270 million cluster tightly around unannounced future MRT alignments, the physical map itself is the substantive evidence of improperity. Random market distribution does not make planners and their relatives land right on top of future transit hotspots years before public gazette.<br>The official defense tries to turn this into a clerical exercise: if you didn&#39;t personally query a GIS file while sitting at your desk, or if you filed a routine HR declaration, you are &quot;cleared.&quot; That completely inverts the logic. When the spatial coordinates of private wealth accumulation match a classified blueprint, a self-reporting form or a department rotation does not erase the advantage. The outcome proves the information moved.<br>We are told public service pay is benchmarked to the highest levels globally specifically to enforce a zero-leakage, airtight standard. Yet ordinary citizens get squeezed on prime location housing lotteries and escalating carbon taxes under strict compliance, while the insiders benefit from an honor system. If your property portfolio maps onto secret planning data, a stamped declaration doesn&#39;t prove innocence—it just documents the overlap.

I am Sri Lankan and I have been watching PM Lawrence Wong&#39;s speeches ever since he became PM. His speeches are full of sound political and economic arguments. He is very erudite and farsighted and in my opinion the best person to guide Singapore in this current constantly changing world of political and economic scenarios.

What of guarding against elitism in an age of hyper-meritocracy, where the rhetoric of merit entrenches extraordinarily high incomes for a self-perpetuating elite? As Michael Sandel argues in The Tyranny of Merit and Daniel Markovits in The Meritocracy Trap, the gravest social divide today is not merely between rich and poor, but between those deemed to have earned their success and those deemed to have failed. Meritocracy offers a seductive justification for inequality: it recasts privilege as desert, and disadvantage as personal deficiency. In doing so, it breeds hubris and entitlement among the winners, while instilling insecurity, resentment, and learned helplessness in everyone else.