KMT lawmakers yesterday vowed to pass a tax-legislation amendment in the new legislative session in a bid to lighten the financial burden on parents with children at senior high school.
The legislators said the amendment would focus on expanding tax relief to include educational expenses. If the plan is passed, parents with children in senior high school would be entitled tax breaks, an extension of the current rule that offers the parents of college students tax credit.
The opposition party also wants to modify laws stipulating maximum tax credits for tuition fees. Currently, the figure stands at NT$25,000, but, under the proposed regulations, each household would save a maximum of NT$25,000 for child enrolled senior high school or college.
"We have proposed these revisions because the poverty gap in this country is such that children from low-income families are being forced to halt their studies because they cannot afford to pay tuition fees," Legislator Huang Teh-fu (黃德福) said.
Huang said that flawed income-tax laws worsen the plight of low-income families because rich people already enjoy a number of tax breaks. He said children from both ends of the social spectrum should have an equal chance of finishing high school.
Huang was speaking at a press conference held by the KMT yesterday morning. Officials at the conference unveiled a poll that said most people in Taiwan felt that the current tax laws favor wealthy people.
But DPP Legislator Chen Chin-jun (陳景峻) reminded his KMT colleague that amending tax rules requires extensive research.
The DPP administration has undertaken tax reforms to safeguard the fundamental rights of all citizens, he said.
TSU Legislator Chen Chien-ming (陳建銘) said his party would endorse the KMT's proposal as long as it benefited citizens.
Despite the fact that the current education policy was formulated by the former KMT administration, the TSU would like to push for the revision of tax laws proposed by the KMT to ease the economic pressure on low-income families, Chen said.
But he cautioned that the revision must be done correctly, or "it would further benefit the financially advantaged in this country."
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching