President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has been playing the reshuffle game. By forcing Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) and some in his Cabinet to step down and appointing Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) and Eric Chu (朱立倫) as the new premier and deputy premier and charging them to form a new Cabinet, he has attempted to alleviate public complaints and improve his own standing.
The new Cabinet was announced on Wednesday evening. In general, it seems to be old wine in new bottles.
The new Cabinet does not make up for Ma’s dour administrative style, his lack of efficiency in governance or his lack of daring and determination.
Instead, he has found himself another group of people to implement old policies. The result is a reshuffle that will not help revitalize the economy, which has been in a disastrous state since the second half of last year. Taiwan’s future continues to look uncertain.
The new Cabinet seems to have given many people renewed hope, but a closer look shows that the situation the government has created over the past year has left us with worse government debt and a larger deficit than expected.
Concrete economic benchmarks such as economic growth, the unemployment rate, growth in imports and exports and per capita GDP are all declining. As daily life gets harder by the day, the public is at wit’s end.
Will the new Cabinet adjust the government’s cross-strait policy? Will there be a change to the thinking that would leave Taiwan’s economy completely dependent on China?
If this distorted thinking is not thoroughly revised, we cannot see how the new Cabinet could usher in a wind of change and save Taiwan from suffering tremendous damage.
Pouring old wine into new bottles only deals with the manifestation of a problem, not the problem itself, so there is no reason for long-suffering Taiwanese to believe that this “remedy” will have any effect.
Appointing a new Cabinet when the president retains all decision-making powers means that nothing will change. With the cause of a sickness still in place, there will be no new medicine.
The government has two main afflictions: The economy and the cross-strait situation. Both are on the verge of becoming terminal.
On the economy, some indicators have improved.
The stock market index and the real estate market have improved slightly, but that is because interest rates are too low. The low cost of capital has created excess idle funds that have moved into financial markets, and this is the reason for the rising stock market and increasing real estate prices. It is, in fact, a bubble economy of sorts.
But there are deteriorating indicators, too: Unemployment for July reached a record high of 6.07 percent, and growth in the first quarter of the year fell to an unprecedented minus 10.13 percent. Further, exports for the first half fell by 32.1 percent and taxes for the January to August period were NT$205.3 billion below target, the highest figure for uncollected taxes for that period in any year.
These data again show that the economy has showed no signs of improving since the beginning of the financial crisis last year.
The stock market is a money game. A rising stock market offers a bit of pie in the sky; it doesn’t necessarily mean the economy is on the way back. For that to happen, the seeds of growth must first be planted in fertile soil.
To save the economy, the government must come up with ways of rewarding business investment.
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