My Take | A lot can be done to keep wolf from the Hong Kong door
Financial chief Paul Chan would be advised to invest the budget surplus in education and health care, pension system reform and labour market shake-up
The takeaway message of The Boy Who Cried Wolf is that if you lied too many times, no one would believe you. But the wolf did come at the end, so the villagers were the real losers.
Former financial secretary John Tsang Chun-wah had long resembled the boy in the fable, and depending on how his budget turns out tomorrow, his successor Paul Chan Mo-po may be in danger of playing the same role. The wolf is the twin challenges of structural deficit and an ageing population, and we are all villagers.
In a recent blog post, Chan stressed the need for prudence and “to save for a rainy day”, though he did add that “present-day needs” should not be ignored. “Whatever the budget measures will be, it will be hard to make everyone happy,” he wrote.
The point, of course, is not to please everyone, but to demonstrate sound fiscal principles on which the budget is drawn. It’s not that our financial secretaries couldn’t please everyone, but they had trouble convincing anyone. It’s a false choice between tackling problems in the present and those projected in the future.
Tsang had never been shy in warning about a medium-term structural deficit and an ageing population. But he gave the impression they were just excuses for being stingy with recurrent surpluses, which were vastly underestimated year after year.