President Lee Myung-bak puts money on the plates of the wealthy through tax cuts for the rich. Minister of Strategy and Finance Yoon Jeung-hyun sits next to the president and says to an elementary school student, “Free school lunches are a populist policy. If you feel hungry, drink tap water.” In front of the window sits a box of money under a sign that says “Educational corruption money is self-serve.”

Finance Minister Yoon has recently received criticism for calling free school lunches a socialist policy riding a wave of populist sentiment. While some members of the Lee Myung-bak government are saying that the program is a fiscal burden due to budgetary constraints, those in support are pointing to costly Lee administration policies such as tax cuts for the rich, the Four Major Rivers Restoration Project and the revisions to the Sejong City Development Plan, which have placed enormous strains on the budget, resulting in less available funding for programs benefiting ordinary citizens.

Additionally, it was also recently been revealed that Kong Jeong-taek, former superintendent of the Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education (SOME), accepted a bribe in relation to the promotion of a school inspector. Over the last four months, an exceptional situation has also taken place in which three serving Grand National Party (GNP) mayors in the southern part of Gyeonggi Province have been arrested, and of the 230 local governments nationwide, the heads of nearly half have been indicted for corruption or bribery.

(Hankyoreh Geurimpan, Mar. 8, 2010)