How can making M’sians beggars for BR1M be Najib’s ‘success’?

BR1M one of Najib’s successes, says Jomo

Legit: I wonder how a renowned economist like Jomo Kwame Sundaram can call BR1M an economic policy and a success story of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak’s administration. Handing out taxpayers’ money with the sole intention of buying votes is not an economic policy but is political corruption. Period.

Instead, the economists and policy makers should be looking at ways where the lower income group could increase their income by doing productive things. The government should be teaching these folk how to fish, and not just give them the fish.

Haven’t people like Jomo realised that Najib is using taxpayers’ money just to sustain himself in power?

Kim Quek: Handing out BR1M is a success story of the Najib administration? That must be the joke of the year!

The motive of BR1M and the way it was structured and handed out was pure corruption to buy votes. If it was not meant to induce votes for BN, why were only leaders of BN component parties allowed to hand out the cash?

And why make bumper cash payments to almost every family (7.3 million recipients in a nation of six million families) when the Treasury is already in acute shortage of funds?

And how do such payments reflect economic success of the Najib regime when the country has been running budget deficits for 20 consecutive years, particularly the Najib years, when it escalated exponentially to an alarming 70 percent of GDP (including government guarantees for loans taken by government-linked companies)?

If the poor need help, then money should be channelled to them, not to everybody. BR1M is not only a gargantuan election corruption but a massive misuse of public funds, and should hence be abolished.

Ge14now: If bribing the rakyat with money that comes from the taxpayer is a success, then you either have a very low understanding of the word success, or you are incompetent. There is no competence in taking taxes from one person and then redistributing them to others.

And there is no risk either, especially since it is NOT the government’s money. You are claiming success for merely redistributing wealth – you have not created any new wealth at all.

This claim of success is so stupid that it explains completely the morass that this country is in – the government is filled with imbeciles who cannot think.

Discerning Reader: This is to bribe your way into power. A good leader teaches people how to fish so that they can fish for themselves a lifetime. A selfish leader will provide fish so that the people are dependent on him to keep him in power.

It takes away the self-respect and worth of the people. What Malaysia needs are programmes to empower the people to earn their own living and compete in the marketplace, and not to lower the standards so that the weakest can still look good but have no marketable skills for them to compete, so that either the government is forced to take them into the civil service or accuse the private sector of discrimination, instead of looking at the mess that they had created.

The private sector recruits according to their requirements, and not according to the degree that is written on a piece of paper.

A Voice From The Wilderness: Success? How could one possibly consider making your fellow men ‘beggars’ a success – you must be kidding me. It is so obvious the whole exercise was a political manoeuvre to gain electorate support, a bloody act of shame.

Hornbill: Maybe Jomo has decided to return to Malaysia for good, so he has to say BR1M is a good policy.

Helping the poor and needy is part of a good economic policy, but it has to be a long-term measure and not ad hoc, like now.

Some of the recipients of BR1M do not really qualify, but still receive it because of flaws in the system. Poverty eradication should be stepped up, and previous measures that had failed to eradicate poverty must be replaced by more robust measures.

There’s no point in saying that we have removed poverty, when every year the BR1M recipients increase in number. There’s no pride in telling the rakyat that BR1M’s total allocation is going to increase this year because it is an indication that our economy is not growing fast enough to lower the number of BR1M recipients.

With economic growth, there should be growth in number of people paying income tax. When we started work decades ago, we had to pay tax immediately, even though our salary was just RM1,000. Now, even RM3,000 is not taxable.

NNFC: The fact that many households live on handouts is clear evidence that the government’s policies have failed. Money should be used to create jobs, train and re-train individuals, and give Malaysians a sustainable income.

Worldly Wise: Handing out cash to the rakyat without providing employment opportunities or some kind of enduring benefit is called cash burning. The money is no more after it is spent, without generating a source of future earnings.

Salary or proceeds of business will come again next month or in the next trade dealing. But not cash burnt. It has no future facility to generate income.

1MDB was formed in 2009. BR1M started in 2011. It was disbursed by BN. It was not disbursed by the Social Welfare Department.

Is there then not a link between the 1MDB kleptocracy and BR1M?

Former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Bersatu president Muhyiddin Yassin and PKR president Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail must put on their thinking caps. Was there a vote in Parliament for BR1M to be disbursed from state funds?

Where is the money from? Stolen from the taxpayers’ money? Does the auditor-general have any comments in his reports from 2011 to 2015 on whether BR1M has been legitimately dished out?

Existential Turd: If not for the massive corruption and siphoning away of the nation’s wealth, BR1M would never have been necessary.

And where does BR1M come from, if not by squeezing the middle class?

The above is a selection of comments posted by Malaysiakini subscribers. Only paying subscribers can post comments. Over the past one year, Malaysiakinians have posted over 100,000 comments. Join the Malaysiakini community and help set the news agenda. Subscribe now.

These comments are compiled to reflect the views of Malaysiakini subscribers on matters of public interest. Malaysiakini does not intend to represent these views as fact.