A Moronic Budget?

Which finance minister cum pm would be proud to table a budget where more than 80% is meant to meet operating expenditures and less than 20% for development expenditure?

No wonder Bolehland is stuck in the low income bracket rut.

The man whom some would could call 'MO1' ('Malaysian Official Number One' - 'Malaysian Moron Number One' to the less kindly disposed) must be hallucinating when he declared that Bolehland is a middle high income society because in the next breath he also announced that the government would be increasing the band aid to 1200 ringgit.

Bolehlanders are wondering how the government is going to raise the money to even meet operating expenditures let alone the development expenditure.

Oil revenue has more than halved. Less people are now paying income tax (it is estimated that only about 20% of the working population are paying income tax- which fact is not indicative of a middle high income society' is it?) Businesses are not doing as well as pre-GST, with quite a few being forced to close because of declining demand and the hassles of managing the GST.

The only thing that is saving the day, so to speak, for the largely clueless and incompetent? administration is the revenue from the hugely unpopular Goods and Service Tax (GST).

The GST is touted as an equitable tax but in a low income society it is just indecent. The only people who are going to feel anything equitable about it are the rich, for they won't be feeling the pinch anyway, while the poor majority are further impoverished.

The only way out is for Bolehland to borrow more. But with the stink of the 1MDB scandal still hanging upon us, with no resolution nor accounting in sight as to the the billions said to have been so nonchalantly stolen from the sovereign fund by kleptocrats at large, the cost of borrowing would be another added burden.

The only way out therefore is to dip into the people's pension funds? That prospect would just about kill any lingering confidence poor Bolehlanders have left in the Ah Jib administration and may be the last nail in the Barang Naik government.

And maybe that last might just be what Bolehland really needs.