The gap between the income of the nation's rich and poor families has been narrowing and is not as great as in neighboring Asian countries, while Taiwan's economy is slowly being revitalized, President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) said yesterday.
"As the global economic climate started to show signs of revitalization last year, Taiwan's economy is also rebounding gradually. The average salary increase for our low-income families in Taiwan reached 9.1 percent last year, while the increase for high-income families was only 0.5 percent," Chen, who is also the DPP's chairman, said yesterday in the party's weekly Central Standing Committee meeting.
He said the government's social security programs have helped to reduce the gap between rich and poor. These programs include the monthly subsidies for the elderly and farmers, national health insurance, laborers' insurance and farmers' insurance.
Chen made the comments yesterday after listening to reports on the national income distribution delivered by Yu Cheng-hsien (余政憲), minister of the interior, Ho Mei-yueh (何美玥), chairwoman of the Cabinet's Council for Economic Planning and Development, and Liu San-chi (劉三錡), head of the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics.
"Compared with Hong Kong, South Korea and Singapore, Taiwan's income gap between the rich and poor is the lowest," Chen said.
Meanwhile, the DPP yesterday said it would officially start a petition drive on Sept. 1 to get a million public signatures on the issue of legislative reform -- a main focus of the party's presidential campaign agenda.
The petition drive would provide the necessary public base of support for the party's goal to push for a referendum on legislative reform next year.
Rank-and-file party officials and members would be responsible for collecting signatures for the petition drive, which will continue until Dec. 10, when the party is to nominate Chen as its presidential candidate.
The petition drive to call for legislative reform is aimed at reducing the number of legislative seats from 225 to 150 by abolishing the overseas legislative seats and reducing the number of legislators-at-large by half. In addition, the reform also seeks to change the current single-vote electoral system into a two-vote system in a constituency and expanding the legislators' current three-year term of office to four years.
In response to the DPP's campaign on the legislative reform, the pan-blue alliance proposed countermeasures by staging another petition drive to protest the government's high tuition policy, the unemployment problem and the hike on the national health insurance fees.
DPP Deputy Secretary-General Lee Ying-yuan (李應元) said the public has to realize that saving a health insurance system that is going bankrupt is more important than opposing the increase in the health insurance fees.
"It is for the good of all groups of people in our society, whose health has be taken care of by the health insurance system," Lee said, adding that "the pan-blue camp's petition drive is simply intended to worsen the gap between rich and poor in a bid to mar the DPP's administrative efforts."
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
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
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