PM to us: We subsidized U!

Sour grapes and 1st class apples. Pak Lah came up with something rather original yesterday, when he told us not to compare Singapore (1st class grapes) and Malaysia (1st class apples). Read it here.

He said the economy is doing well:

“Please trust us – we are your government. If you look at the economy, we are doing well. That is a fact proven by figures. But people still claim otherwise because of increasing prices. This is a very simplistic way of analysing the economy.
“Nobody is happy to see prices rising but this is out of our control. The question is not how to bring down prices but how to help the rakyat cope."

He said we are a subsidized people, a heavily-subsidized people:

“Every country in the world is faced with rising oil prices except maybe Brunei but you cannot compare. The RM40bil oil subsidy we give out can be used to build better schools, roads, hospitals and infrastructure but we don’t want to burden the peopleation and medical treatment was also heavily subsidised by the Government.
“We subsidise even water and electricity, yet people are angry when they hear the word ‘toll’. We try to subsidise as much as possible but we still need to impose toll charges because we need to build roads,” he said before thanking the Chinese community for contributing to the country’s economy.

So thank the Chinese, he added:

“The private sector is dominated by the Chinese and I want to say a big ‘thank you’ to the community for creating so many job opportunities,” he said.