Are you aware of the implications in reducing government spending? Certain things will have to go, and since so much is interconnected, there will be downstream effects that are going to be very hard to predict. Suppose less budget is allocated to maintenance of public facilities -- expect lack of public confidence in other government decisions, increased burden on healthcare, diminished quality and frequency in repair works leading to needing greater frequency of maintenance and increased costs in the future (SMRT?), public unhappiness over old facilities, country image and tourism dollars etc. Budgeting at the government level is an extremely complicated problem full of trade-offs and knowing that there would be certain decisions such as cutting defence spending that the people cannot accept.

While there are cases where the money wasn't well-spent, you'd find that such inefficiencies are present in every organisation and government -- it's expected, given the huge scale they operate at. While the decision making behind each spending may be sound and scrutinised by even several levels across several agencies (which then people complain slow) with certain shortcomings accepted, it's impossible to predict or account for everything while still acting in a timely manner. It's easy to point at Marina Bay, but not so easy to point at the countless other spendings that made sense and so attracted no attention. Policy and government analysts across the world frequently rank SG near the top of the world in terms of governance (I recall), so we're actually doing very well in this area.

Personally I'd want taxes to be reduced on the poor and increased on the rich, but I can accept the official stance that it's also equally important to keep the rich people and businesses here to help boost the economy through increased spend and creation of jobs. It's clear that giving handouts is an election strategy, but another way to see it is that it allows the government to more finely control the distribution of tax burdens across the population.

Probably sounds like a pro-government piece, but I think ours are doing much more rights than wrongs.