The more I read Kishore’s article the higher my temperature goes up.
According to Kishore, the aspiration to own a house is reasonable but a car is not. The basis of his logic is the limited land space in Singapore. Such being the case, by extension of the logic, it will not be long before PAPist will declare that even the dream to own a house is NOT reasonable. Not far from now, Sg will run out totally of land even to build HDB. So is he going to say the dream to own house is not reasonable? Is he not already condemning singaporeans to perpetual unhappiness
Even with 5.4 m people, we have barely enough land for road network. Does Kishore seriously believe Sg can handle 7 million? Papists have selective amnesia. They forget that the tight space we have is made tighter when they increase the population from 3.5m surreptitiously to 5.5 m in the last few years. All this shortages of space and the escalation of car prices are primarily the result of PAP bad policies. Worst still now Kishore puts the blame on Singaporeans saying we ‘gripe too much’.
It is dead wrong to compare with America. In Singapore, the COE tax on a car is easily 150% to 200% of the cost price of car. This is entirely controlled by the government through their “Vehicle Quota” pool. Therefore, it is not a fair system, because if you tell Singaporeans to forgo their aspiration to have a car, then you have to tell EVERY one to do that including all papists. But the COE system is favouring the rich. This kind of system doesn’t happen in USA, car prices are based on cost price + margin. No meddling by the government on vehicle quota and COE.
Finally, Kishore surely knows, a car is useful not just for commuting to work. You need a car to run various small business. You need the car to support old and very young especially in hot weather Singapore.
It is wrong to condemn Singaporeans to perpetual unhappiness by telling them to forget about the aspiration to improve their life by means of a car, even if it is a simple 1000 cc car.
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