A simple glance at the Executive Yuan’s budget plan for next year was enough to show that the plan was “messy, careless and irresponsible,” the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus said yesterday.
The caucus has only received about one-quarter of the budget statement, which was required by law to be submitted before today, but it has seen many incredible items in the documents, DPP Legislator Tuan Yi-kang (段宜康) told a press conference.
The government agencies had listed “ridiculously meaningless” items in their budget statements, such as NT$30 million (US$1 million) for the promotion of China policy listed by the Mainland Affairs Council and NT$290,000 for a research plan into China affairs listed by the Taiwan Provincial Government, which was streamlined in 1998 and has basically not operated since then, Tuan said.
“However, none of those agencies was as crazy as the Overseas Compatriot Affairs Commission, which had allocated NT$760,000 for a book review event for its employees,” Tuan said.
Tuan described the budget plan as “sloppy allocation of large-scale projects and squandering public funds for little things” and said “somebody would have to be held accountable for this mess.”
The lawmaker said the DPP would “definitely strictly monitor the budget” during the upcoming legislative session, which begins on Sept. 18.
The Cabinet approved a total government budget of NT$1.9446 trillion for next year on Aug. 23.
The budget does not look good for an administration that promised economic growth, job creation and improved social welfare for the people, DPP Legislator Chen Ting-fei (陳亭妃) said.
The proposed expenditure on public infrastructure of about NT$190 billion was the lowest since 2004, while outstanding central government debt has reached an all-time high of NT$5.269 trillion, she said.
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
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
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
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: