There’s only one explanation that makes any sense. The SCMP don’t pay Simon Patkin for his silly little rants, he pays them for the free publicity.
Monday’s paper had one of his more banal efforts, starting off with Donald Tsang’s strange suggestion that Hong Kong people should have more children in order to solve the problem of an ageing population. He uses this to claim that "many middle-class couples already support at least three children through their taxes". However, he offers no statistics to back this up, and moves swiftly on to his real concern:
Indeed, despite a forecast budget surplus, it is unrestrained government spending that is causing a cyclical deficit, which pundits claim will drain our reserves and put us into the poorhouse.
Er, pundits? You mean people who write opinion pieces in the SCMP. Oh dear, it must be serious. I don’t fancy living in a poorhouse – do they have aircon?
Simon does have statistics to support his complaint that spending on education, health and social welfare are substantially up since 1989, though I’d wager that these have not been adjusted for inflation, making them virtually useless.
Mysteriously, he complains (warning – cliche alert) that "there has been a deafening silence from the accounting profession about curbing this increase" as if bean counters were supposed to tell the government what policies to adopt (if they do, I suggest that they adjust their figures for inflation).
He proposes a clampdown on immigration, because (as we know) many immigrants are welfare scroungers. We know this because it has "been reported as a serious problem", though Simon hedges his bets by saying that "most immigrants work hard" (perhaps they run their own free-market think-tanks from their spare bedrooms). In fact, of course, the most obvious solution to the problem of ageing populations all round the world is to allow more immigration, though ironically many of the right-wing commentators who want lower taxes are also paranoid about immigration.
This whole article can really be summarised very simply. Simon is against government spending:
there should be a cap on government spending on education, social welfare and health each year. This should be reduced to zero over the medium term.
Does he mean the cap should be zero or expenditure should be zero? As with much of this article it’s hard to tell, but based on his past opinions I assume he means the latter. Never fear, because the middle-class are very benevolent. So, although Simon is nervous that we will all end up in the poorhouse if government spending is not curbed, he is really quite keen on a return to the Victorian era when the poor had to rely on charity and really did live in poorhouses. Ah, happy days.
Ordinary Gweilo 
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