Opposition Move Forward Party leader Pita Limjaroenrat last week slammed the government for allocating 300 billion baht — the greatest single expense — of the 2023 budget bill to pension payments for retired civil servants. He said 40% of all state borrowing and taxes collected will be used to fund the ballooning pensions payouts rather than development schemes and labelled the bill for the forthcoming fiscal year the “ill elephant” budget.
Economically, Mr Pita’s opinion holds water in terms of the portion of the country’s budget that pensions payments constitute. But, morally, Mr Pita failed to acknowledge the fundamental principle underpinning the scale of the pension payments.
Normally, civil servants earn about a third less than their private sector equivalents but they can expect to be rewarded for their service with good welfare, and a particularly generous pension after they retire. This is the reason that the state is still able to attract capable staff to work as state officials.
The reason the burden of pension payments has become so onerous is because Thailand’s public sector has grown fat at the same time as its population of working age citizens has begun to thin out due to changing demographics caused by it moving towards becoming an ageing society.
The government has made efforts to reduce pension payments for civil servants by introducing the Government Pension Fund, a contribution system exclusively for civil servants. It has also proposed extending the retirement age for government officials from 60 to 65 years old.
However, the latter proposal has been met with resistance by those who think the state wants to pass the buck onto those in employment while making no constructive effort to address root causes of a consistently high sum that sooner or later the government still has to pay.
Mr Pita should not label retired state officials as a burden the country must endure. We need to accept that the civil service is a key player in long-term development plans even if it remains in need of root and branch reform.
What Mr Pita should be zeroing in on is the current government’s ushering in of a pension payment for MPs who need only win once to qualify for a lifetime pension payment after they reach retirement age.
Such a generous reward for such short-term tenures, particularly when many of those elected to office are already better off than most people in the country, is far harder to justify.
Even though the pensions are partially made up from contributions paid by the lawmakers themselves, the largest part still comes out of the public pot which is funded by Thai taxpayers.
This pension gratuity is too much to swallow and especially unjustified given the current poor performance of the country’s economy and ongoing divisions in society.
How many of those appointed to high office actually take their responsibilities as seriously as the title and financial benefits require? Many choose to remain absent from parliamentary sessions, only voting when ordered to by party whips, and continue to be spotted falling asleep in the aisles as they fail to contain their contempt for the voters who granted them this life of luxury.
Yet while these former MPs and senators enjoy their generous old age allowances, it is the retired frontline civil service workers, who have paid taxes throughout their entire working lives, who find themselves singled out and blamed for being a burden on the state coffers?
