I think housing and healthcare should be a human right. It should be free for everyone. You should not have to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in an exhausting job to be able to afford it. Lawrence Wong and the Singapore Government can give every Singaporean a free HDB flat, free healthcare, free necessities like water, food, electricity, without a Singaporean having to work a single day of his life. You can eliminate poverty, homelessness, and hunger completely. Many countries in Europe have already achieved that. It is an entirely realistic goal.
How do we achieve it? The answer is simple, the answer is boring: make sure the rich pays more taxes
Singapore has a progressive tax system for income tax where the taxes you pay increases depending on income level.
It's 3.5% per month if you make less than 3 thousand dollars a month. It becomes 7% if you make 3 to 7 thousand dollars a month. And the tax rate increases by about 3% with every 3 thousand dollars increase a month (as in your tax rate is 11.5% if you make around 10k a month, and 15% if you make around 13k). The tax rate eventually maxes at 24% when you make 30 thousand a month. So whether you make 30 thousand a month or 300 thousand a month, your tax rate still remains at 24%.
So basically, the tax rates in Singapore are fucking bullshit. The richest people are not being taxed enough
Middle income earners in Singapore makes 4500 to 7 thousand singapore dollars a month. Singaporeans who make anywhere from 0 to 7 thousand dollars make up the first 80% of earners.
So in Singapore the tax rate for the bottom 80% of Singaporeans is from 0 to 10%. And the richest 20% (those who make more than 7k a month) has a tax rate from 10% to 24%. Once again, the tax rate increases by about 3% with every extra 3k earned per month, but only maxes out at 24%.
But in Europeans countries like say the UK ,the bottom 80% of earners has a tax rate of 0 to 30%, and the richest 20% has a rate of 30% to 45%, thus maxing out at 45%
So really, I think for Singapore, you don't even need to increase the taxes of people making less than 7 thousand a month. But for people who make more than 7 thousand per month, they should at minimum, have a tax rate of 10% to 50% (following the same pattern of increasing rates by 3% with every 3 thousand dollars made per month), with a max rate of 50%. That significantly increases taxes collected from the wealthy while not being so scary that it significantly reduces investments and employment.
Also, a bigger portion of the Government budget should be spent on the IRAS (That stands for 'Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore'). That is Singapore's Government agency that enforces tax laws. Because as you know, the rich have all kinds of fancy ways to evade taxes, methods that aren't available to the poor. Like the rich can quickly buy a yacht, or jet, or a building that won't be used much. Basically purchasing expensive items that aren't tax-deductible to avoid paying millions of dollars of taxes a year.
Or the rich can give expensive, non tax-deductible 'gifts' to other rich friends. Or they can take untaxed private payments for service. For example: private tuition teachers who teach rich kids school subjects like Maths or English, can charge 50 to 100 dollars per hour, and these rich parents pay the tutors by cash. So these primary and secondary school tutors can make 5 to 10 thousand dollars a month and pay absolutely no taxes, no contribution to CPF, nothing.
So if the IRAS' budget and workforce was say tripled or more, all these tax-evaders will have to fairly declare their taxes and won't commit blatant tax evasion, otherwise they'd be sent to prison. As they should be, because evading taxes is essentially like not paying rent, you're not paying money that you owe to the Government, which means you are stealing from the Government, and by extension, stealing from Singaporeans. That money could be spent on to providing cheaper healthcare, housing and food for all Singaporeans. Not paying taxes, leads to people getting tortured.
The IRAS has been underfunded and incompetent, which is why so many people successfully evade taxes. I want the IRAS to be as, if not more enthusiastic in finding and arresting tax evaders, as the Singapore police are in arresting non-violent drug consumers.
So both taxing the rich a higher percentage, and giving more funding and power to the IRAS, will literally provide hundreds of billions of dollars of taxes, which is enough to afford millions of free HDB flats to give to millions of Singaporeans who make less than 7 thousand dollars a month. And it's also enough to provide free healthcare, free food, water, electricity, all the basic things a Singaporean needs.
It is not unrealistic utopian idealism, you just need Lawrence Wong and the PAP to care less about putting money in their own pockets, to have less concern for the greedy, overspending, thieving rich, and instead have more concern for the poor Singaporean in a 1-room HDB without air-conditioning, who needs to work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in an exhausting, miserable job, just to barely survive.
There are other ways for the Government to have more money to redistribute to the poor. Like removing National Service and significantly reducing military spending, or reducing infrastructure spending (we don't need to spend millions of dollars on a tunnel to not cross a traffic light and get to another place 2 minutes faster, who gives a fuck). We should not be wasteful and should reduce spending on those things regardless, but money collected from lesser spending on industries is only a small fraction compared to the amount of money that can be gained from collecting more taxes from the rich.
It's a simple, boring, economic solution that gets every Singaporean a free HDB flat from birth. And the only reason Lawrence Wong and the PAP don't do it is because they only care about themselves and their rich friends. But of course, public policy should not be based on greed and self-interest, but the welfare of everyone, especially the poor and discriminated.
The PAP Government must be removed from office so we can elect an opposition that enforces (or at least gets us closer), to universal housing and healthcare for all. We must speak up, protest, suffer. We will prevail