malaysiakini and DOUBTS about the RM60 BILLION PACKAGE

Let's face some hard facts. I don't believe the latest budget is going to prevent Malaysia from slipping into a recession as we are basically a world trading nation and have to ride or fall on the world's economy.
There was quite a good discussion on Bernama's "Hello Malaysia" in which one of the speakers mentioned that one problem with most of the spending the government does cannot be verified by independent bodies.
Of course we do have the Annual Horrible Reports of the Auditor-General but the basic theme is that government spends our monies freely with many leakages all over the place in terms of bad projects, questionable contracts and shoddy execution. I would hazard a guess that perhaps 35% of all spending is lost on such negligent and even criminal intent.
So this article in malaysiakini is not surprising. It asks the question Will the rakyat really benefit this time?.
Given that there is no reduction in income tax and no direct grants to the poor, it seems that this budget does little to address the problems of those who are struggling to make ends meet.
I would have given a special allowance of RM300 per month to those over 60 who do not pay income tax and also get no pension from the government.
Creating more jobs in the civil service is also not productive unless it helps to increase the numer of male teachers in school. I'm not being sexist here but I believe there are too few male teachers in primary schools.
My only take on the intake of more civil servants is that it is used to create a more healthy racial balance in the civil service.
As for the idea that compensating the toll companies is a benefit, the government should have used this opportunity to buy out PLUS and then freeze or even reduce toll charges. This move would have reduced a major cost factor for goods and services. I believe this would have also created much goodwill for the government as it will show a definite and serious intent to benefit taxpayers.
There was a call for cooperation from opposition parties and I wonder if it was a cynical appeal after the cloak and dagger operation that led to the downfall of the Perak government.
To me the global economy will recover in two to three years unless you believe in Armegeddon and what we need to do is to spend more effort to clean up major perceived weaknesses in our system like the Police and the Judiciary. If we can fix those, we will be better placed to take advantage of the uptrend.
I am sure the Opposition will be more willing to help in those areas.