A few days ago, an amendment to the Civil Servant Retirement Act (公務人員退休法) passed its third legislative reading, changing the current “75 system” to an “85 system.” This means that, following a grace period of 10 years, after which the new legislation comes into effect, civil servants who have put in 25 years of service can claim their full pension when they reach the age of 60, or at age 55 after 30 years of service — 85.
In any other comparable country, this would be seen as a major event. Not so in Taiwan.
The public didn’t appear to find it too out of the ordinary — it only made the papers for one day — and the opposition party did not even feel obligated to comment.
Of course, the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) had the right to rail against the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement. There are many obstacles in the way for cross-strait development in the future, but the history books will ultimately deliver the verdict on whether the agreement is really going to bring about the sacrifice of independence in Taiwan for closer ties to China.
The current cross-strait politico-economic situation is both precarious and fluid, but the DPP seems to be a bit of a one-trick pony: Its entire output could be summarized as “China = Bad.”
There are other issues to be concerned about, not least the one of soaring national debt, which is probably the more pressing issue at the moment. It is quite exasperating to see such indifference to the question of civil service pensions, considering how closely it is related to the problem.
It is not like this has not been looming for some time. The government assures us that we are only in the red to the tune of about NT$4 trillion (US$125 billion), but the actual figures are far higher if hidden liabilities are taken into account. According to last year’s figures, we are actually more than NT$13 trillion in arrears, exceeding the entire GDP of less than US$400 billion.
If you want to know how important an excessively high national debt is, you need look no further than Greece’s recent economic crisis.
If ever there was a time for the opposition to show us what they were made of, this would have been it, but they proved to be little more than a damp squib.
We didn’t even hear a peep out of them when Minister of Finance Lee Sush-der (李述德) made the rather audacious claim back in March that the nation’s finances were in the best shape of virtually any other country in the world.
You would think that after eight years in power, the DPP might have a better idea of the nature of the national debt.
As it stands, the current government, under the leadership of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), is at this very moment trying to push amendments to the Public Debt Act (公債法) through the legislature that would increase the local government borrowing ceiling. This will surely encourage an expansion of the national debt.
However the opposition party is not performing its role as a check and balance to the government. Nobody is expecting the DPP to come out with its guns blazing on this issue, but at the very least we might want to see a bit of moral fortitude on its part in protecting the interests of the country and its citizens.
So what has the civil servant retirement system got to do with the problem of national debt, you may ask?
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