The measures in Budget 2009 that was unveiled yesterday to help Singaporeans weather the global recession were pretty good. I think the government has gotten most things right with this Budget, although it’s a pretty expensive budget.

My top personal concerns in this recession are education and healthcare, and both have been addressed, at least this year. It might be curious to some that jobs didn’t make it to the top of my list of concerns but my perspective is that even in a recession, there are still jobs available and the question is whether people are willing to do these jobs, which are probably going to be contract or short term jobs with a lower salary.

This recession is not the end of the world; it’s an economic cycle. I believe what comes down will eventually go back up. Sure, it’s important to mitigate the pain during a recession but I think what’s more important is to prepare ourselves adequately so that we can ride the upswing quickly when it comes back. If people are losing jobs now, why not put them back in schools and gear them up to take advantage of the opportunities that will surely come by later on?

As for healthcare, I think it’s even more important than basic necessities. Even if you lose your job, you can apply for assistance to take care of food and other basic needs. There are many ways to stretch the dollar to pay for daily necessities. However, there’s no way to stretch the dollar for medical bills. Medical bills can be extremely expensive and people definitely need help during lean times, unless one is hard-hearted enough to let people who cannot afford to pay medical bills die.

And, I’ll have to applaud the Job Credit plan. The U.S. government wants to pay employers to hire workers and this can be easily exploited by firing and re-hiring workers. Paying companies to retain workers is a more sensible idea that’s less susceptible to exploitation. The cap at $2,500 means that those in the PMET category are going to be left out but hey, there’s always the option of going back to school. Of course, this might not be easy for someone with a family to feed and a mortgage to pay off but in lean times, I think all of us don’t have a choice and we have to find our own way to cope.

The defense budget has also increased quite substantially. Well, I’m not going to quibble about that because lean times in a rough neighbourhood isn’t exactly a good thing for us. I just hope the money will be well spent to secure our home.

Ultimately, this so called ‘Resilience Package’ isn’t going to get us out of the hole. What it is doing is to try to ensure that we survive as we wait out the storm. At the same time, we’re building our ships and getting ready to launch once the storm passes. It’s a pretty sensible approach and I hope this approach will continue until the storm is over.

And, I’m grateful the Singapore government isn’t meddling too much in the markets. The Finance Minister has made it clear that the government will only help sound firms ride through the crisis. For a good read on why the government should not meddle too much, the KTM has a great entry on the topic (which I only found out recently).