Minister of Finance Christina Liu (劉憶如) said yesterday that the government may consider scrapping a special tax on selected goods and services, also known as the luxury tax, after devising a fairer system for imposing a capital gains tax on property transactions.
However, creating this system would be a step-by-step process, Liu said, adding that registering actual selling prices for property transactions, currently implemented by the government, would be a prerequisite for introducing a property tax based on the actual selling price.
“The levy of the luxury tax was to supplement the inadequacy of the present taxation system, which may not exist forever,” Liu said in a legislative question-and-answer session.
Her comments indicated that a capital gains tax on property transactions was a policy direction Taiwan would be exploring in the future.
In addition, the imposition of an alternative minimum tax (AMT) could be another approach to the levying of supplemental taxes.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Tseng Chu-wei (曾巨威), a professor of finance at National Chengchi University, suggested the government rescind the AMT once a reasonable system for imposing a capital gains tax on securities transactions had been introduced.
Liu said before these taxes are introduced, appropriate complementary measures would have be set up to raise the efficiency of the tax and lower the impact on certain industries.
Creation of suitable supplementary measures would be one of the major goals for the 16-member task force set up last week to discuss taxation and finance issues, Liu said.
The task force, which is composed of six government officials, eight academics and two representatives from the private sector, will hold its first meeting on Wednesday next week to prioritize issues.
Liu reiterated that “ability to pay” will be the task force’s primary governing principle for tax issues, with the basic intention being to reduce the tax burden on the salaried classes.
Conversely, those whose main income source comes from capital gains would be asked to contribute more to the treasury, Liu added.
Liu, as the task force’s convener, will be fully responsible for the task force’s achievements and will have the ultimate power to decide tax and financial issues.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
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