In order to shake off a reputation for making empty promises, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his administration have vowed to follow through on providing free lunches to elementary and junior high school students, as well as insisting that the integration and upgrading of Taichung County and City as a special municipality will take place.
In doing so, the government has requested that a proposed amendment to the Local Government Act (地方制度法) be put on the legislative agenda next week.
The Ma administration should have let these two contentious political checks bounce, but instead it has forced them through — simply to establish its authority.
The free lunch policy appears to enjoy public support, but it requires an annual budget of more than NT$20 billion (US$584 million). By proceeding with this, the government has not only failed to acknowledge social welfare priorities, but it has also aggravated the situation facing government finances.
The promise to upgrade the administrative status of Taichung County and City was part of Ma’s “three cities, 15 counties” campaign pledge, but it will only widen the gap between urban and rural areas and worsen relations between the central and local governments.
A recent piece of worrying news said national deposits over the last decade were concentrated in five counties and cities — Taipei County and City, Taoyuan County, Hsinchu City and Kaohsiung City — which accounted for 76 percent of the total, while in 14 counties, deposits increased by less than 1 percent.
Worse, in Nantou, Chiayi and Taitung counties, deposits have decreased. It is thus of vital importance that the government narrow the gap between urban and rural areas, yet Ma’s policy to integrate Taipei, Taichung and Kaohsiung counties and cities opposes this.
Taipei County is already a rich county, so if the administrative status were upgraded, it would become even wealthier. The county government would receive NT$150 billion more in funding and could raise debt of up to 2.5 times its annual budget, whereas other counties and cities can only raise debt equivalent to 70 percent of their annual budgets. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer: Those counties that are not upgraded will end up being abandoned by the Ma government.
Compared with its communist counterpart on the other side of the Taiwan Strait, the Ma government has reason to be ashamed. In the past, China followed a policy that developed the southern and eastern part of the country, benefiting only part of the population, but it has now realized the importance of balancing the differences between urban and rural areas. In contrast, the Ma government continues to take from the poor to help the rich.
Given the huge differences between upgraded and other cities, those counties abandoned by the government will not give up so easily. Once they start to protest, the government will be on the run.
If Taipei City and County are integrated into a special municipality, its population would make up nearly one-third of the national population, and tax revenues received would account for more than half of the national total. It would not be surprising, then, if a future mayor emulated former provincial governor James Soong (宋楚瑜) and challenged the central government. What kind of situation would the Ma government find itself in then? There could be constitutional implications.
The free lunch policy and the “three cities, 15 counties” promise are only two promises made by politicians over the past several years to consolidate political support. Statistics from 2007 show that the government had spent more than NT$40 billion building 147 useless “mosquito halls” — unoccupied buildings — over the years.
Between 1988 and 2004 under the governance of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), governments spent another NT$40 billion building two “mosquito airports.” These cost 10 times more than the amount of money that Chen is alleged to have embezzled. Such waste is unfortunate, but it is even more unfortunate that the consequences cannot be offset.
For example, take the development of the Southern Taiwan Science Park (南部科學工業園區), which cost almost NT$100 billion, and the construction of the high-speed rail, which cost about NT$500 billion to NT$600 billion. Since the rail line was designed to run through the park to satisfy local vote captains, chipmakers canceled investments in the park because of fears that vibrations from the train would affect operations.
Also, many high-speed rail stations have been situated away from the most populous cities. This may have increased land prices in these areas, but these locations also reduce the appeal of high-speed rail for as many as 20 percent of the number of potential passengers.
Moreover, Taiwan has the densest conglomeration of airports in the world, with the result that Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport cannot be upgraded and is falling behind many less developed Asian airports.
There are many other examples, with several billions of NT dollars wasted to fulfill campaign pledges.
Such disasters are more a result of politicians’ thirst for power than for money. To secure more votes and gain more power, they hijack massive national projects and infrastructure and distort them.
Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) should be despised if he has solicited and taken bribes, and he can be punished through legal means and forced to return illegally obtained income. The above-mentioned campaign promises, however, are worth a hundred or a thousand times more in numerical terms — all of it public money — and the wealth that financed these disasters cannot be recovered.
Making reckless campaign promises to gain more power is no better than corruption, and fulfilling them is far worse than not doing so. I therefore urge the Ma administration to drop these campaign promises that should never have been made. The public would be grateful.
Lin Cho-shui is a former Democratic Progressive Party legislator.
TRANSLATED BY TED YANG AND EDDY CHANG
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