Criticism has yet to abate over President Chen Shui-bian's (
Based on the principles of financial management, the major difference between personal financial management and public financial management is that the former is based on income and the latter on expenditure. If a person spends more than he can earn, the result will be a financial crisis or even bankruptcy. Therefore, spending must be constrained by income.
Conversely, public financial management emphasizes the legality and necessity of public spending, and a lack of revenue is not a sufficient excuse for delaying public spending measures. For example, the government cannot deny children's right to education on the grounds that the government does not have the budget for a national compulsory education program. If expenditures on education are held back due to a lack of revenues, this will affect the level of education of the nation's citizens.
Similarly, the government cannot reduce investments in infrastructure on account of a lack of funds: National economic development would bear the brunt of such cutbacks. Therefore, revenue should not limit how much a government will invest in the nation.
A nation's expenditures should be regulated by the rule of law, supervised by the legislature and controled by an auditing mechanism.
If close scrutiny of a budget has been conducted and the government finds it necessary to spend such a budget, the financial divisions within the government will be responsible for seeking the money for such budgetary needs. As to how to collect the sum needed, it would be a question of how to ensure a fair allocation of the burden.
As long as there is a need for an expenditure, the government can fund it by levying taxes, issuing bonds or selling national property.
However, issuing bonds is tantamount to passing the debt on to the next generation, and selling national property is no more than squandering our ancestors' inheritance. Although these two approaches are less likely to provoke a backlash among the general public, they are not necessarily to the people's advantage. Thus, a responsible government should ensure revenue for public expenditure by levying tax.
Although Chen's decision to increase the tax burden has drawn criticism, there is nothing wrong with using this method to ameliorate the nation's financial situation.
If Chen chose instead to issue bonds or sell national property, there would probably be few complaints, but this does not free the people from bearing a financial burden.
Therefore, the idea of increasing the tax burden is not a sin; rather it is a more straightforward approach that lets people have a clearer sense of the burden they are under, compared to the issue of bonds or the sale of national property.
If discussion over tax increases can make people more aware of the nation's financial burden, and draw attention to the necessity and efficaciousness of government spending, as well as the fair distribution of the tax burden and whether or not our legislators are properly supervising government spending, then surely this is beneficial.
Lai Chen-cheng is the dean of general affairs at the National Taipei College of Business.
TRANSLATED BY DANIEL CHENG
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs