EXTRAORDINARY times call for extraordinary responses. Faced with the worst recession in Singapore's history, Finance Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam had to think out of the box and pull out all the stops. This is what he has done in the Budget for FY '09. The record $20.5 billion 'resilience package' that he unveiled yesterday will require presidential assent to be delivered in full.

It will lead to red ink in the budgetary accounts that Singapore has rarely, if ever, seen. But it will go a long way to preserve every job that can be preserved (plus create a few thousand more), to save every company that can be saved and to help people, especially the most vulnerable, tide over what what threatens to be the most wrenching recession in memory. And this might not be all. Mr Tharman said that the government is ready to do more, if needed.

Perhaps the most eye-popping, even audacious, measure in the Budget is the jobs credit (equivalent to 12 per cent of the first $2,500 of wages of each employee), which is being extended to all companies in Singapore. This is a clever variation of the 'job creation tax credit' offered by many states in the US, which provide tax credits to companies that create new jobs - say, $1,000 per job created - but typically subject to a minimum number of jobs created.

Mr Tharman has made the scheme far more generous, and foolproof. Companies don't have to create new jobs to get the credit. They get it just by maintaining workers on their payroll; in other words, they are incentivised to keep their workers employed. Note, though, that they also have an incentive to expand employment; the more workers that it has on its rolls, the greater the job credits a company will get.

One possible criticism of the scheme is that it is indiscriminate: rather than concentrating financial assistance on companies that are the weakest and most likely to lay off workers, the jobs credit doles out largesse to all companies, including those that are profitable and had no layoff plans and which thus stand to collect a windfall. To that extent, it could be suggested that the scheme involves some waste. But as against this, it's worth noting, first, that it is hard to target companies. In the current economic environment, there is no way for the government (or anyone) to ascertain just how badly which companies are hurting, or which will remain profitable and for how long.