Now that the disputed Industrial Innovation Act (產業創新條例) has passed the legislature, the government must propose supplementary measures to improve its financial shortfall, experts said yesterday.
The hotly debated business income tax rate will be screened by legislators on Tuesday after the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus submits a proposal to cut the rate from 20 percent to 17 percent.
The Ministry of Finance said that if the business income tax rate were slashed to 17 percent, it could create a shortfall of NT$34.3 billion (US$1.09 billion) in government revenue.
Wu Chung-shu (吳中書), dean of National Dong Hwa University’s College of Management in Hualien, said that in the long run, the government would have to raise some tax rates to make up for the shortfall.
Wu said the nation’s value-added tax rate of 5 percent is substantially lower than the more than 10 percent tax applied in most countries.
While tax breaks will hurt government coffers, the aging population and the high dependency ratio will continue to increase government debt, Wu said.
Wang Lee-rong (王儷容), director of the Center for Economic Forecasting at the Chung-Hua Institute for Economic Research, said the tax cut would exacerbate the government’s financial burden.
CIER said that economic growth this year would likely suffer by 0.91 percentage points — falling from a projected growth rate of 4.99 percent to 4.08 percent — if the government trimmed public investment to balance its finances.
However, Wang said the forecast was conservative, as it did not calculate the potential impact of a planned economic cooperation framework agreement (ECFA) with China and the appreciation of the Chinese yuan.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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