Government may lose in the next elections?
I have been wondering as to why the Government now says that they may not be the next Government after the next elections?
Could it be because the number of Singaporeans struggling to make ends meet has increased to levels that are reaching breaking point?
Household income per member
According to the Key Household Income Trends 2013 report – the average household income from work per household member among resident employed households by deciles in 2013 was $463, $896 and $1,268 for the 1st – 10th, 11th – 20th and 21st – 30th deciles, respectively.
Take home pay after CPF contribution
However, these figures are including the employer CPF contribution.
This means that the net take home income after adjusting for the employer and employee maximum CPF contribution of 37 per cent can be as low as $317, $613 and $867, respectively.
How do you survive on $317 or struggle with $613 a month?
Real increase in income was only from $4 to $18?
Since the real annualised increase from 2008 to 2013 was 1.3, 1.8 and 2.2 per cent respectively – the increase was about $20, $52 and $89 for the five years, respectively.
This is an increase of only about $4, $10 and $18 per year for the bottom three deciles, respectively.
How hard life must be when you only had a real increase in income of just $4 or $10 a year? Also, this is the average income – so, many had a lower or even negative real increase.
1.2m people struggling to make ends meet?
Since there were 1,174,500 resident households in total – it means that there were about 117,400 households per decile or about 407,552 household members (3.47 members per household).
So, the bottom three deciles were about 352,200 households or 1,222,134 members.
Even worse if include households without any employed persons?
Actually, the income figures calculated above is even worse if we do not confine the calculations to employed households only, because the statistics do not include about 110,800 households with no working persons including about 72,100 “retiree” households.
How many in poverty?
Since the median monthly household income per member from work among resident employed households was $2,247 in 2013 – the percentage of households in poverty as defined by those earning below half the the median – $1,124 – may be about 30 per cent of the population.
In this connection, Hong Kong’s Chief Secretary Carrie Lam said that “The poverty line is defined as half of the median monthly household income of all domestic households in Hong Kong, prior to government intervention like tax and social benefits transfers”.
So, if you are the Government – wouldn’t you be “scared” by these numbers in the coming elections?
Win battles lose war
TRS Contributor