It is so sad to see the rich becomes richer and the poor trying to survive in the face of rising petrol prices, bus fares, toll charges, high food prices, etc. To make matters worse we read that Petronas made RM35 billion net profit on a revenue of RM137 billion for their financial year ended March 2005.

Shouldn't Pak Lah recover part of this gain (through special petrol taxes or surcharges) and pump it into the budget and economy? Why only punish the small people who have giving you so much support?

If you still cannot balance your budget, why don't you allow car buyers to import their cars and paying the Treasury directly for the Approved Permits , not unlike Singapore or Hong Kong. This way our Treasury can make RM500 million or so?

In fact with the price of oil hitting US$60, we should have the confidence to pump prime our economy and tell the world to invest here as we are able to give them cheap and reliable sources of energy.

Since our ringgit is pegged to a weak declining US dollar, we see massive wealth destruction. This is compounded by a weak stock-market suffering from a severe lack of confidence with no government support.

Hence the small guy becomes smaller and poorer, whereas Petronas and the exporters become super rich due to the undervalued ringgit. A cheap ringgit unfairly subsidises all exporters, some deserving, some not.

A better solution would be to re-peg or float the ringgit and use the exchange gain from this to provide export incentives for deserving exporters.