千二百四十七：GST as Robin Hood

Last night, my sister told me her uni prof for her taxation class had laughed at the idiocy of the reason for the GST rise. Using regressive taxation to help the poor indeed. This morning, another economist was speaking on the radio with regards to the issue. He agreed that the rich spent more and will definitely be prone to paying more tax, and yes, the taxation from the rich would probably be pooled into the fund. But his question was that is the rise from taxing the rich 100% going to be used to subsidise the rise in GST burden of the poor? Definitely not. So no matter what, expenditures would definitely be rising for the lower income earner. Sighz. I hope we don’t see more MRT suicides after the tax has been implemented. If in general, pricing of goods increased, wouldn’t the 5% tax be of a larger value as well? In that case, increasing the prices of luxury goods would help both the retailer and the government right? The only losing party would be the rich buyers of those goods. If they do that while maintaining prices of necessities low, then they would really be doing some real Robin Hood action here, ie, “robbing” the rich to help the poor.

Last night was very strange. I went to sleep early, about 11.30pm? And I fell asleep with the lights on, cos my sis was in the room at that time. I heard my mum calling me “Ting ah, Ting ah” and I was in the middle of my dreams and I thought it was morning already with my mum trying to wake me up so I opened my eyes. Darkness. It was the middle of the night and my mum was in her bed sound asleep. !!! I thought maybe it was just a dream but it happened another 2 times after I fell asleep. Both times woke up to see no one and yet the voice had been my mum’s, so real and very insistent that I wake up. So creepy! When it was really time to wake up this morning, of course I could barely get up. #^%&^