Time to regain public's trust

EDITORIAL

Published: 21 Mar 2013 at 00.00
Newspaper section: News

The cabinet on Tuesday gave the green light to the Finance Ministry to borrow 2 trillion baht from domestic and foreign sources to implement the country's most ambitious infrastructure development projects.

The government says the projects will greatly improve the country's competitiveness and bring about economic prosperity.

Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Kittiratt Na-Ranong said the huge borrowings would put public debt at less than 50% of gross domestic product _ still a safe level that will not harm fiscal discipline.

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nipper240
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Discussion 4 : 21 Mar 2013 at 11.324
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In order to work out just how big a number like one trillion is, lets put it this way:
1000000000000 seconds is equal to 31688.8 years ! That how much debt you are about to add to the country!

At one Baht per second! If we take the US understanding of one trillion.
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Renaissance
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Discussion 3 : 21 Mar 2013 at 10.163
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It's fine to be polite here, but politicians are politicians, and they have a one-track mind. To expect that anything less than the standard 35% will not disappear in corruption is to be idealistic and naive. Past behaviour indicates future behaviour. As for expecting transparency, the current crop of politicians won't even reveal the price they sell rice at. What hope do we have that they will reveal the costs of each project? Perhaps we should be realistic here and not so diplomatically polite.
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Victor
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Discussion 2 : 21 Mar 2013 at 09.272
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And since the Bangkok Post generally used British version in their writing, I think, then its 'trillion' here is not accurate because it means 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 (19 digits) instead of 1,000,000,000,000 (13 digits).
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Victor
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Discussion 1 : 21 Mar 2013 at 08.541
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Two million million of anything is so large that I don't think any grade school student can write it down in real numbers, but the 'trillion' used herein by the Bangkok Post could be very confusing since it could means a million times difference between British and American version.
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Time to regain public's trust | Bangkok Post: opinion