Legislators yesterday disagreed on the significance of the government’s planned social welfare budget for next year, with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) saying it surpassed the amounts set aside during the previous administration and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) saying that less money was being set aside for emergency relief operations.
At the press conference hosted by the KMT caucus, officials from the -Directorate--General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) addressed the social welfare budgets since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) took power in May 2008.
Between 2009 and next year, they said, listed social welfare expenses accounted for an average 19.7 percent of the general government budget each year, higher than the 17.6 percent in the previous four-year period.
In response, DPP lawmakers told a press conference that the budget was a “very big boast.”
DPP Legislator Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯) said that although the budget is up by NT$38.9 billion from the previous year, the lion’s share of the increased budget is planned for spending on national labor and health insurance.
“The budget for social welfare did increase by NT$38.9 billion, but it is another story when you take a deeper look at it,” Tsai said.
A little less than NT$37 billion of the increase is spent on social insurance, he said, including NT$10.6 billion that the Taipei City Government needs to reimburse the central government — a debt that started to accumulate when Ma was mayor from 1998 until 2006.
The actual allocations for emergency relief was cut by NT$955 million and the budget for the elderly farmer allowance has been cut by NT$1.65 billion as well, Tsai said.
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:
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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