Sometime ago, I was having a chat with Nicole about filing tax returns. Even though my tax returns are automatically filed, I decided to log into ‘myTaxPortal’ on the IRAS site to confirm that. As I did so, I noticed the tax calculator – an online tool which allows me to calculate the amount of income tax I need to pay for 2010.
Out of curiosity, I transferred the figures from my IR8A onto the tax calculator. I was a little surprised to see that the total amount of taxes I need to pay for the year comes was a mere 2.5% of what I earn in 2009. I also found out that the 20% mandated CPF savings actually serves as a tax relief as well, though some might consider CPF to be as good as money ‘given’ to the government gahmen. I realized that all these years I have never bothered with the details of my tax returns, and I had merely just fill in the figures blindly.
Still, 2.5% of this year’s income is a surprising low tax rate, and that probably explains why there is this relative lack of of welfare in Singapore. It was rather sobering to realize that I lived in one of the countries with the lowest tax rates. Christopher aka Modeus pointed out that this is a fact that few Singaporeans appreciate while many complain endlessly about COE, Road Tax, ERP and GST. In my opinion the first three is more or less self inflicted with a car purchase, though I wouldn’t deny that adds on to the costs of businesses which require transports. That’s not mentioning I am a big fan of the ERP.
As for GST, the fact remains that even if you spend every single cent of your disposable income (i.e. 80% of your income), the total amount taxed will only be 5.6% of that year’s income. Even when I add the 2.5% I paid as Income Tax, that’s just about 8.1% of my total income for the year. That’s not mentioning that since I won’t be spending every cent I earn, the real effective tax rate would be far lower than that! And that’s something I can be happy about.
~~~ * ~~~
I read this on the New York Times recently: Members of Congress from both parties sought to put more pressure on China to allow an increase in the value of its currency, saying Beijing’s policy of holding the value down to give China an edge in export markets was holding back job creation in the United States.
In short, the Americans are accusing the Chinese of currency manipulation. I’ll admit I know nuts about finance and economics, so I am totally confused as to how that came about. After all my understanding about economics and finance is as good as Mahathir who thinks currency trading involved traders trading physical bags of different currency.
I suppose that when the Chinese pegs the Renminbi (or Chinese Yuan – CNY) to the US dollar (USD), that means that as the Obama Administration prints more money (which it did, since it’s broke and has no money to bail the banks out), Chinese currency would have necessary appreciate against the USD. For China to maintain the current exchange rate, China will simply print more money as well because I don’t know any better way than this. In short, China has definitely printed more money since it had pumped a lot of money into its own economy last year to mitigate the impact of the crisis that originates from… well… the US. Where is all the money going to come from when China is spending money on infrastructure, while also buying US Treasury bonds?
Based on my understanding (or misunderstanding) of the state of affairs here, I think the real currency manipulator is the US. US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner says that the US would like to maintain a strong USD policy. That simply means the US expects everyone to start printing more money – except well, China. If China is going to do that it’s the equivalent of slamming the brakes on its economy and we all know what disastrous consequences would result from that! Now, I call that evil.
Next, China is the second largest buyer of US Treasury bonds – i.e. China is the second largest creditor (after Japan) of the US gahmen’s debts. I take it that the reason developing (aka poorer) China is lending money to developed (richer) US is to preserve value of its own currency.
Since these loans are denominated in USD, that means when the US gahmen pays the Chinese gahmen it would be in USD. If China has appreciated its currency, it would suddenly discovered that it might have gotten the short end of the deal because after making the exchange back to CNY, the Chinese maybe left with less money than it paid for the bond. Just who lends people money, and get back less than its principal sum even after interest? Maybe to friends and when you lend friends money you generally can forget about getting it back anyway. Not to mention that it would be hard for China to consider the US a friend in the first place!
In short, the freaking Americans are telling China: ‘I am expecting you to forgo the interest you are going to make from the loans you gave to me so I can create jobs for my people. Yep, I am saying that you should be paying to create jobs in the US for Americans. If you aren’t gonna do that, I am gonna punish you.’
The Americans probably forgot that as Russell Peters once said the Chinese is the one race that is best at making money out of someone else. I am glad China stayed put and told the Americans to fxxk off.
~~~ * ~~~
I recently made the comment that ‘Apple is a piece of shit company that’s only good at packaging its low tech stuff as being more superior… and has always resort to legal action to harm competitors who simply think they could do the same with their own products.’
I am basically saying Apple makes no technical innovation but the way I worded it made it sound like Apple does not innovation at all. When read that way, obviously such a comment pushes the limits of patience in everyone and it isn’t going to earn me any friends other than those who already hate Apple as much as I already do. In no time someone disagreed that Apple is not doing any innovation. He pointed out that Apple was ‘the first’ to put GUI (Graphical User Interface for the uninitiated) and the mouse in its own computers, and also ‘the first’ to bring in the power of linux/unix into the the hands of everyone.
It is a fair view from someone I have always know to be fair in his opinions. On retrospect, he was right to point out that Apple innovated personal computing or the way we use personal computers. Unfortunately we are disagreeing on different perspectives. As far as I am concerned, I was simply pointing out that Apple made no technological innovation and I quickly went into defensive since none of these – GUI, the mouse and even Linux / Unix – were invented by Apple.
It is a fact that Xerox beat Apple to in both the mouse and GUI as far as application of these technologies are concerned. Unfortunately for Xerox, its focus was more for research and business application, and not for the mass consumer market. And as for Linux in specific, my perception of it is that it was something like Unix, but created for use on personal computers because someone had enough of Microsoft’s buggy products.
From my point of view, if Apple or any of the iFreak faithful of Steve Jobs Stiff Drop was to claim Apple as a technology innovator, it will be as good as Nazi Germany claiming credit for the rocket when all it did was find application for it in warfare, while it was the Chinese who invented it and the Americans who put several men on the moon with it.
I’ll still stand by my comment.