An election budget or an "erection" budget?

PM Najib has blown it. He had a chance to set critical things right during his presentation of Budget 2011, but instead he is being pilloried in social media spheres. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter -- Malaysian in these spaces have not spared him the ridicule and contempt his Budget largely deserves.

RM212 billion, with a large chunk of it on mega multi-billion ringgit projects? An MRT for RM40 billion, a 100-storey tower of wank for RM5 billion, RM26 billion for a Financial District? It all seems so exorbitant in a time when we need to be laying the foundations to break us out of the middle income trap and onwards towards becoming a high income nation. Instead, what the PM is trying to do is exactly what his predecessors did to get us into this trap in the first place: spend, spend, and spend some more.

Let's not be naive: in the real world, you need to spend money to make money. In country terms, you need to invest in projects to stir the economy, to get the financial juice flowing, to stimulate liquidity, to create jobs, to encourage further spending. A Government that doesn't spend is as fail as a Government that spends too much.

Having said that, it doesn't mean that the bulk of your budget should be used for this purpose, and certainly not in projects that will tend to favour the few rather than the many. An MRT in KL does nothing to stir the economies of Terengganu, Sarawak and Sabah. Neither does a tower that nobody wants, nor a financial district that will surely fail unless it's backed up by a reform of financial policies and a steady inflow of foreign capital (FDI).

It would have been so easy to get things right, Mr Najib. I'm just a common man, and even i can see what this country needs. You, with your army of analysts and advisors, could not?

VOI
21/10/10