Although this sounds good in terms of health and social justice, the main driver for policy making for our government still is lack of income, fear of losing and elites’ capture of policymaking process. Thus, the tension between wanting to spend more to capture votes vs having less fund.
As long as politics remain competitive as now, and the system allows for those who won (i.e. government) to use levers of power to try to remain in power, we will not get true reforms that our country needs. All hypes about doing the right things will remain forgotten in trying to win the votes
A reminder that the richest people do not have the highest income. The majority of their income exists in the form of capital growth, and the majority of their expenses are covered by companies they control.
Such a populist move would affect workers, not the truly rich.
capital growth is not an assessable income tho? and even then, you will have to be in the trade of buy/sell assets to be assessable on the net profit iinm. no CGT in malaysia either.
That was my point. Because the majority of their income is not assessable, they don’t fall into the top category of earners. That category is just filled with actual workers.
Yep, the actually wealthy have their assets tied up not in personal holdings. By any simple metric that is being thought of, the first impacted are salaried/employed/contracted workers (since taxable income is a usual source of yardstick)
I’m all for encouraging Malaysians to cut down on sugar. Currently you have to make an effort to ask restaurants to nix the sugar in drinks. And some food is unnecessarily too sweet
these days i’ve noticed that drinks are not that sweet anymore cause sugar price gone up a lot. Tho many joints (Malays from experience) their drinks taste like water now cause they could no longer rely on sugar to mask the taste.
Means-testing on healthcare subsidies is such a regressive idea, not to mention scapegoating rich people for accessing public healthcare in our current healthcare system is close to lying considering:
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most middle class and above tend to be funnelled into using private healthcare anyway, especially with the way the facilities are all counted as equivalent (per the bancian data) ie a location is considered well-covered even if most of it is private (hospitals/GP clinics/pharmacies), so who exactly is “using” public healthcare even tho rich? Hmmm, let’s check on what benefits public servants above certain grades and parliamentarians can access in a public hospital
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the medication shortage is currently being normatively papered over by accessing private health stocks, which themselves are also capped in price. Who exactly is the rich here, if an uncle is being persuaded to access the nearby private hospital by the klinik kesihatan doctor because the kk doesn’t have the appropriate heart medication?
A 33mil population is not a small market. Plus if ASEAN could get their act together and negotiate en bloc the way the EU does, you can go a long way in negotiating for more competitive pricing. The one good thing from the Trans Pacific Partnership being blown up by Trump to me in this matter was the fact that US Big Pharma-negotiated clauses with regards to market access got blown up too.
Anwar’s populism only sounds nice but it would eventually doom poor people and the working class most of all. Where’s the taxation reform? The budgeting reallocation? Why is the conversation not at all considering increasing investment in our healthcare system? We’re not poor (yet).
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Hopefully it’s a well thought out police. Hard agree on cutting sugar subsidies. Why are taxpayers’ money being used to fund the proliferation of a disease lol
