Budgets are a bit like department store winter sales; they generate a modicum of excitement and proffer some bargains that you don’t quite believe in but seem to be attractive; then you take the goods home and wonder why you bought them in the first place.
A whole week has elapsed since John Tsang Chun-wah delivered his budget and the good folks who give him the money he was so generous as to dish out are left wondering whether this was another case of the winter sales all over again.
Tsang reminds me of those divorced dads who periodically remember that they have children
As ever, his budget was jammed full of what are misleadingly called “giveaways” or maybe this is not so misleading because they are little more than giveaways in the sense that they reveal nothing approaching a strategy, have only very short-term affect and mainly contain rewards for those fortunate not to be among the one in six Hong Kong people living below the poverty line.
Tsang reminds me of those divorced dads who periodically remember that they have children and visit them bearing gifts providing instant gratification while generally forgetting to support the hardworking mothers who do the real work of bringing them up. Of course the kids love seeing daddy bearing down on them with ice creams but something more substantial would be better.
Unlike daddy’s gifts, Tsang’s giveaways are paid for by the people receiving the “gifts”, so it’s not quite the same. Yet this business of withholding a bit of tax, deferring a clutch of charges and so on requires serious sums of money that would otherwise be hoarded away or spent – but on what exactly?
Generally speaking this government is deeply in love with big projects, such as the bridge to nowhere that will stretch across Macau to Zuhai, which is indeed somewhere but as matters stand only 45,000 vehicles are licensed to drive across the border, divide that number by the HK$130 billion that’s being spent on the highway and the per capita cost gets to be pretty daunting. Next up will be a massive splurge on building a new airport runway, plus the West Kowloon Cultural District and so on.
