US President George W. Bush has signed into law a massive bailout package for US financial institutions. The bill had initally been rejected by the House of Representatives amid concerns that spending US$700 billion of taxpayers’ money to buy up questionable assets and bail out financial companies was not socially just. However, after measures were added to protect the interests of the middle classes, such as tax cuts and exemptions, among other additions, the bill was approved by both houses of Congress.
President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) administration has also been confronting a financial crisis. How does its attitude compare to that of US officials? Ma’s government has proposed a series of measures to boost the economy and stock markets. On Sept. 9 it put forward 10 proposals to revitalize the economy, but the package fell short on policies beneficial to the public at large. The government does not seem to care much about the middle class. No wonder people are growing more concerned about social injustice and less confident in the government.
The Finance Ministry’s Tax Reform Committee is scheduled to meet today amid widespread calls from industrial and commercial interests for tax cuts to help the economy. The financial team set up by the Presidential Office has not come up with any measures to revive the stock market. It has only suggested cutting inheritance and gift taxes and setting up a sovereign wealth fund, and it seems likely that the Tax Reform Committee will act in accordance with these signals. These are tax cuts for the rich, however, and only serve to shift even more of the tax burden onto the shoulders of the less affluent.
Taxation in Taiwan is not well balanced. Most government revenue comes from income taxes. Many high earning companies and individuals pay very little tax because there are so many deductions and exemptions. Sometimes the extremely wealthy manage to pay less tax than the average office worker. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp chairman Morris Chang (張忠謀) has repeatedly called on wealthy Taiwanese to bear a fairer share of the tax burden. The finance ministry is aware of the situation, but unfortunately has been insensitive to it, so government policy continues to favor the wealthy.
The government knows that the deteriorating economic situation is causing ever greater income disparity and the Ministry of the Interior has proposed a plan to subsidize families whose monthly household income falls below NT$25,000. But recipients would be chosen by computer, which means they might include teachers and military personnel, who are already exempt from taxes, while those in real need are left out. This does not meet demands for social justice, but all Minister of the Interior Liao Liou-yi (廖了以) can say is, “better luck next time.”
Even in the US, which always has stressed the importance of free markets and a free economy, lawmakers managed to squeeze measures to benefit the disadvantaged and the middle classes into its bailout plan. It makes you wonder whether Taiwan’s government — which stressed liberalization and deregulation when it took office — cares about growing income disparity nationwide and whether it has heard the complaints of the disadvantaged and the middle classes who lack the political strength to challenge the government’s financial and economic policies.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
RSS