Juvenal was a Roman satirist and poet who lived in the 1st Century AD and who coined the term “Bread and Circuses” in describing the entertainment and offerings to the common people to keep them quiet in the the dying days of the Roman Republic before its collapse and transition to the Roman Empire.
Wikipedia explains it this way:
“Bread and circuses” (or bread and games) (from Latin: panem et circenses) is a metonymic for a superficial means of appeasement. In the case of politics the phrase is used to describe the creation of public approval, not through exemplary or excellent public service or public policy, but through diversion; distraction; or the mere satisfaction of the immediate, shallow requirements of a populace, as an offered “palliative.” Juvenal decried it as a simplistic motivation of common people.
The jubilee baby pack is a good example of Juvenal’s bread and circuses. It entertains, it gives the false impression that the government cares about having more babies but it will have absolutely no effect on the birth rate. I cannot imagine any young couple rushing home to have sex and make babies just to qualify for the $50 goody bag.In the Straits Times of today (April 17) more than a quarter-page was devoted to something called the jubilee baby gifts. This is a gift pack to be given to mothers who deliver a baby in 2015, the jubilee year of our independence. The gift pack consists of small items which will not add up to more than $50 so the total cost for 35,000 expected babies is $1,750,000, not much more than a year’s salary for the PM. They could probably fund it from the People’s Association’s petty cash box.
The government has stubbornly refused to believe that the greatest impediment to improving the fertility rate is financial, yes, it’s money, money, money.
Consider the following:
1. Pre-natal and delivery charges for producing a baby can be up to $10,000 – a third of an average woman’s annual income.
2. Three years of nursery and kindergarten costs as much as a university degree. This is absurd when primary and secondary education is virtually free.
3. Cost of a maid (if the mother wants to work) is over $1,000 a month when you add in the levy and food for the maid.
4. A tin of baby formula costs $30. The same tin, same brand in Johore Bahru cost 50% less.
5. A confinement lady for 4 weeks costs above $2,000 (if you can get one).
Improving the total fertility rate and having more babies is an existentialist issue in Singapore, if it carries on at the same abysmal rate of 1.2, native Singaporeans will eventually become extinct. It calls for bold measures, not fun and games like the jubilee baby gift pack.
Improving the TFR is a public good, as it benefits the whole country and all of society and as a public good, the cost must be the burden of the taxpayer at large, not just the young couples who are expected to do their bit at great expense to themselves. We can learn a lot from advanced Western countries who have sustainable TFRs which subsidise child-bearing and child-raising (having a baby in Canada costs virtually nothing).
Other examples of the PAP’s bread and circuses are the Singapore Day in London, the F1 Grand Prix and the $8 billion PGP which has been analysed to be nothing more than an accounting trick in the budget. I am sure readers can think of others.
Thomas Pain