So PM Lee won’t say he’s worth the money he gets paid, but he won’t say he isn’t either. He will say it’s worth paying someone a lot of money to do his job, because if you don’t you won’t get the best person you possibly could. But, come now friends, he’s not saying he’s the best. And he’s definitely not saying how much he gets paid, and absolutely not confirming—to the BBC or anyone else—that he’s the highest paid head of government in the world, because then, if if it were true, you’d know he thinks he’s the best.
Don’t worry, though. That kind of labyrinthine logic might give the rest of us poorly paid plebs a brain meltdown, but it’s no biggie to him. It’s the kind of priceless, A-grade leadership we’re paying him for!
So, although we don’t know for sure that he’s paid five times what Obama gets (and hey, even if that were true, most of it would presumably go on COE, ERP and a season pass for the G-Max bungee anyway), we can at least speculate how Singapore might be improved if the same principle applied to some other industries.
Just imagine. Pay cabbies the same salary we now pay doctors and—abracadabra!—you’ve solved the rush hour taxi shortage and got yourself some surgically steady hands behind the wheel. Oh, but then we’d be down a doctor or two… hundred! So let’s increase their wages to match the bankers’ crazy millions. All those alpha-male types could still make their fortune but now save some lives at the same time. It might even mean shorter queues for sandwiches around Raffles Place come lunchtime.
But wait! Who’s going to keep the financial system afloat? Well if you want talent you have to be prepared to pay for it, right? So let’s raise banker bonuses into the trillions and watch all the government officials come running. As PM Lee says, they’re not doing their current jobs for “King and Country” anyway; so you could hardly blame them.
That just leaves one pesky problem: no-one running the place! And that’s where we—your humble journalistic servants—step in. Let us reassure you we know what we’re doing. Are we the best candidates for the job? Well, we couldn’t possibly say. Do we deserve it? Judge us on what we do, not what we’ve done. Are we worth all that money? Well, it’s true we wouldn’t ordinarily take a job without knowing what the salary is, but in this case—for the honor of serving you, the people— we’re willing to chance it.
