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Thread: What America Could Learn from Singapore's Social Welfare System

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    What America Could Learn from Singapore's Social Welfare System

    An interesting way to implement a safety net. It is somewhat subsidiarity in organization.

    What America Could Learn from Singapore's Social Welfare System

    ...The Singapore welfare system is considered one of the most successful by first-world standards. World Bank data shows that Singapore’s government health expenditure in 2015 is only 4.3 percent of GDP, a small fraction in comparison to other first-world countries—16.9 percent in the US; 11 percent in France; 9.9 percent in the UK; 10.9 percent in Japan, and 7.1 percent in Korea—while achieving comparatively equal or better health outcomes of low infant mortality and higher life expectancies. While most of Europe, Scandinavia, and North America spend 30-40 percent of GDP on social welfare programs, Singapore spends less than half as much while maintaining similar levels of economic growth and a society relatively free of social problems.

    The first thing to know about Singapore’s welfare system is that qualifying for welfare is notoriously difficult by the standards of most of the developed Western world. The Singapore government’s position on welfare handouts is undergirded by a staunch economic philosophy of self-reliance and self-responsibility where the first lines of welfare should be derived from one’s individual savings, the family unit, and local communities before turning to the government. The state, in other words, should not act as a guarantor of means but merely a guardian of final recourse.

    One of the most substantial organizational forms of welfare in Singapore are the state-guided self-help community groups that are structured along racial lines. They were formed to help tackle poverty alleviation for the lowest-income citizens by helping them through various schemes of general education to improve their economic opportunities. This welfare program started within the Malay community in 1981 and was deemed so successful by the end of the decade that the government gradually expanded it to form similar self-help organizations for the “under-performing” groups of the Chinese, Indian, and Eurasian races, too.

    The Singapore government’s involvement in these community groups goes only as far as a general regulatory oversight. Unlike typical welfare states, funds for these welfare organizations are not mechanically funneled from a large taxpayer-funded pool into an ever-increasing bureaucracy. Instead, funding is derived from a mixture of government schemes that draw a token sum of one to two dollars from each citizen’s government savings account (in other words, crowdfunding), as well as encouraging optional charity from the general community.

    ...
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    Mister D (01-06-2019)

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    Sounds like something to consider when fixing the problems with our failing government welfare systems.
    ΜOΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ


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    Chris (01-06-2019)

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