Oh yes we do.
Here in Singapore, the government continues to respond to the worsening downturn with austerity of the sort that avowed scrooges like nineteenth century prime ministers William Gladstone and Robert Peel would have approved of.
The latest cost-cutting move is a pay cut of up to 19pc for all senior civil servants, including the PM and President…..
Action this day as Churchill would have had it. Cut taxes by even more of course, in order to still have a fiscal stimulus.
Low taxes. Low bureaucracy for businesses. Keeping public finances in order. Not losing their heads. Singapore is going to do very well indeed out of this downturn.
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It should be noted that the 19% cut the President and Prime Minister are taking are out of their £1.4m and £1.3m salaries! That would make them the best-paid public “servants” in the UK – and that’s in a country half the size of London: http://www.students4freedom.com/index.php/2008/11/25/singapore-cutting-bureaucrats-wages-but-not-by-much/
Oliver:
It’s the total “public employee” expenditures that’d count, I’d imagine, on a per-capita basis or one adjusted for per-capita GDP net of the
public employee tab. Something suggestive of
“value received,” in other words.
I know hardly anything about Singapore’s organization but I’d be inclined to suspect an important difference between their public sector employees (especially what would be considered “civil service”) and ours (UK and USA): whether such workers were unionized.