- Sun
- Mar 3, 2013
- Updated: 2:13am
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Tsang defends budget measures as prudent
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Huangpu is a district of pigeon fanciers and the skies over Shanghai have seen birds racing back to their coops for the best part of a century. Words and pictures by Jonathan Browning.
Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah said on Saturday he had to be fiscally prudent when developing the economic policies he announced in last Wednesday’s budget.
Tsang told RTHK programme Hong Kong Letter that extravagant economic policies would fail in the long-term.
“If I spent money extravagantly for the sake of popularly, not only would our generation suffer, but also the next generation,” he said.
Tsang added that fiscal prudence was the principal responsibility of the financial secretary and he had to ensure taxpayers’ money was used in the right areas.
Tsang also said he was “not disappointed” with negative feedback from the public - even people saying the budget lacked new ideas.
“New ideas are not my primary concern. It does not matter if our measures are old, but are able to help the needy and move the city forward,” he told Commercial Radio.
He noted that government expenditure had increased more than 10 per cent in the coming year. “[Such an increase] is rare globally,” explained Tsang.
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6:33pm
HK$900 billion minus HK$800 billion equals:
a) HK$100 billion ?
b) minus HK$3.5 billion ?
What is lacking in your department ? New batteries for your calculators or high-school kid level arithmetic ?
( Seems both are lacking)
Please read Tom Holland's and Jake van der Kamp's columns these past few days. Seems that between the two of them they have more financial know-how, vision, and basic economics than all the staff in your over-paid budget department put together ( not to mention 10 x more common sense!)
Please, PLEASE resign before the 2014 budget.
I cannot stand another ground-hog day of such idiocy
PS : Whatever happened to fixing our air pollution problems, as promised by CY and Christine Loh, before we have Beijing -scale smogs every day ? You earn HK$300K + p.m, and drink coffee and watch french movies, but whatever "class" you class yourself under ( top !? upper ? middle ?? lower ???) you have to breathe the same filthy air as the lowest of low classes.
Welcome to the huge lower class club who comprise most of HK
6:23pm
2011/12 Actual expenditure ($’000) 115,525
2012/13 Approved estimate ($’000) 34,542,507
2012/13 Revised estimate ($’000) 990,607
2013/14 Estimate ($’000) 57,272,497
Although the approved estimate for 2012/13 is 34 Billion, the revised estimate is slightly less $1 Billion ($990,607,000). Looking back to 2011/12, the actual expenditure was only $0.115 Billion. So… 2011/12: 0.115B; 2012/13: 1B and then… 2013/14: 57B??? Is it prudent to estimate the expenditure for Miscellaneous Services to be 57 Billion ($57,272,497,000) for 2013/14? Even if the Miscellaneous Services are those “hightlights” in the Budget, we have only about 45.5 Billion (excluding the expenditures of Infrastructure, Kwai Chung Hospital Redevelopment and Injection into Community Care Fund.)
If the total of expenditures is over-estimated as above, the estimated deficit for 2013/14 will unlikely be HK$4.9 billion as suggested by FS. Let readers judge whether he is fiscally prudent as claimed.
6:02pm
Planning is about years and decades.
It's not by trashing out money to the poor, property market and other public matter that it will be solved.
I am looking at other countries who are claiming being a socialist country but with huge deficit that worsten with the so called crisis.
The public money is like managing personal finance. It's not because you have money that you need to spend it all at once. Savings is someting important too for planning and emergency.
5:53pm
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