Malaysia, a RINO country

Last year, our PM Najib gave the most important speech of his career during the Budget when he spoke about the rapidly growing deficit.
It was the PM’s most focused and deliberate address on income inequality to date, but for many it wasn’t nearly alarmist enough, for it didn’t recognize how far this nation has fallen.

It’s time we call it what it is: Malaysia HAS become a third-world nation.

LOOK AT THESE SHOCKING STATISTICS.  These countries’ exchange rate used to be  Hong Kong    RM1 to HK3.        But today only worth HK2         (Lost 33 %) Singapore    RM1 to S$1.         But today only worth S$0.40     (Lost 60 %) and getting worse...... everyday! Taiwan          RM1 to TWD16     But today only worth TWD9       (Lost 44 %) And look at our per capital income!! Pitiful.

Malaysia has become a RINO: Rich In Name Only.
By every measure, we look like a broken banana republic.
Not a single Malaysian town or city is included in the world’s top 10 most livable places.
Only our KLIA airport makes the list of the top 10 airports in the world.
Our students are rated in the bottom third in PISA math and science, and some 30 countries have longer life expectancy and lower rates of infant mortality.
The only things Malaysia is number one in these days are the number of snatch thefts per day and adult heart disease.

Four decades of trickledown economics; the monopolization, privatization and deregulation of industry; and the destruction of the labor market has resulted in 5 million Malaysians living in poverty based on 2009's HIBAS survey, while the 50 richest individuals own more than one-third of the nation’s wealth.
As the four richest Malaysians enjoy a higher net worth than the bottom 40 percent, our nation’s sense of food insecurity is more on par with developing countries like Indonesia and Tanzania than with OECD nations like Australia and Canada.
In fact, the percentage of Malaysians who say they have insurmountable household debt at some point in the last year is three times that of Germany, more than twice than Italy and Canada.

The destruction of labor has been so comprehensive that first-world nations now offshore their call center jobs to Malaysia.
In other words, we’ve become the new India.
Foreign companies now see us as the world’s cheap labor force, and we have our economic policies to thank for that.

In Sweden, the minimum wage is $19 per hour and workers enjoy a minimum of five weeks paid vacation every year.
In Malaysia. the minimum wage is a tick above RM3.40 per hour and workers can expect no more than 12 days of annual leave.
So guess what?
The likes of Honda, Toyota etc have all set up in Thailand to take advantage of the our ever-changing automotive policy.
Moreover, the profits of these foreign companies goes toward stimulating their economies instead of ours.

So, it’s amusing when right-wingers blame our failures on liberal policies because nothing could be further from the truth.
We are faling behind into a third-world banana republic.
A business model that the rest of the country is forced to compete with i.e. lower wages, low corporate tax rates, low property taxes, and low environmental and labor protection, which results in a migration of industry and jobs from our country, which means a shrinking of the tax revenue base.
Take this as an illustration of how we are in a never-ending death spiral race to the bottom.

Not only is the middle-class fast becoming the working poor, but upward mobility is becoming almost impossible to attain.
At a time when Malaysia should be investing in its own future, it is dealing with a sequestration that was never meant to have happened.
It happened because politicians would rather destroy the economy than see a meritocracy policy succeed. 

THE COUNTRY HAS NOT LOST A DECADE, BUT HAS LOST TWO GENERATIONS

The signs foretell that Malaysia will be left behind during the rise of Asia. 

There was mass migration of talent, shameful waste of human capital through a faulty educational system which discouraged meritocracy and mass migration of skilled people to countries like  Australia and Singapore.

 

		PER CAPITA INCOME (US$)
Country		1971		1981		1991		2001		2008
KOREA REP		302		1,648		7,119		10,243		19,505
TAIWAN				4,859		8,077		14,426		17,040
SINGAPORE		1,061		5,645		17,750		20,865		38,172
HONG KONG		1,107		6,015		15,353		24,695		31,887
MALAYSIA		406		1,805		3,099		3,701		7,000

 

THE FIGURES TELL THE STORY OF HOW MALAYSIA FELL FAR BEHIND THE ‘FOUR ASIAN TIGERS’.   

From 1981 to 2011, a period of 30 years, we had leaders who lived in their own world, and implemented policies which drove away investors, and depended on the revenue from oil and commodities to fund the restructuring of the economy and so that there would be no identification of race with economy.

 

HOW DID  SOUTH KOREA , TAIWAN, HONG KONG AND SINGAPORE  BECOME THE ASIAN TIGERS? 

BECAUSE THEY EMBRACED FREE MARKET POLICIES.   

Analysts say that between 1980 and 2005, the world embraced free market policies. These caused living standards to rise sharply, educational standards rose, poverty declined and democracy improved, and life expectancy rose.   

China is the leading example of the miraculous effects of free market policies launched in 1978.  

Coming to the end of 2013, EVEN INDONESIA, THAILAND & VIETNAM ARE AHEAD OF US!!!! 

Robust public investment had been a key to Malaysian prosperity in the previous century. 
It was then considered a basic part of the social contract as well as of Economics 101. 
As just about everyone knew in those days, citizens paid taxes to fund worthy initiatives that the private sector wouldn’t adequately or efficiently supply. 
Roadways and agriculture research were examples. 
The resulting world-class infrastructure, educated workforce, and technological revolution fed a robust private sector.
But only during that time.

Malaysia is in urgent need of significant investment.
We need to not be stuck in a stale debate from two years ago or three years ago.
A relentlessly growing deficit of opportunity is a bigger threat to our future than our rapidly shrinking fiscal deficit.

That’s one part of the solution.
A higher minimum wage; higher taxes on corporations and the rich; and a greater percentage of the labor force protected against inflation will help restore the Malaysia whose middle-class was once the envy of Asia, and whose people were among the happiest and healthiest on the planet