The public is broadly supportive of President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) pension reform plans, despite a large protest staged by retired and active civil servants, public-school teachers and military personnel earlier this month, according to a survey released by the Taiwan Style Foundation yesterday.
Among those polled, 80.8 percent said they supported the government’s plans to push for pension reform, compared with 9.2 percent who were against.
A cross-analysis of the results showed that while pension reform received the highest support among respondents leaning toward the pan-green camp at 91.5 percent, a majority (71.9 percent) of pan-blue-leaning respondents were also in favor of reforming the nation’s cash-strapped pension systems.
About 83 percent of respondents agreed to the introduction of “a ceiling and a floor” to monthly pension payments that can be drawn by retirees, in order to prevent people who earn high wages from receiving large pension payments while protecting low-income earners, the poll showed.
A significant portion of those polled (43 percent) believed the ceiling should be set to less than NT$50,000, while 25.2 percent said the floor should be between NT$25,000 and NT$30,000.
As for the income replacement ratio of pensions, 30.6 percent of respondents said the ceiling should fall between 50 percent and 59 percent, while 31.1 percent said the floor should also land in that range.
“The survey showed that the large protest on Sept. 3 did not affect the support of the vast majority of the public for the government’s pension reform plans,” Taiwan Style Foundation board director Wang Zhin-sheng (王智盛) told a news conference in Taipei yesterday.
As respondents’ ideal income replacement ratio was similar to the average pension of 57.6 percent in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development nations, a public consensus seems to have gradually been forged on the matter, despite some criticizing weekly meetings of the Presidential Office’s National Pension Reform Committee as being chaotic and unproductive, Wang said.
Tsai’s approval rating dropped 4 percentage points from 53 percent last month to 49 percent, while her disapproval rating climbed from 41.2 percent to 43.3 percent in the same period, the poll showed.
The president appears to have disappointed pan-green supporters the most, as the percentage of that group’s members who expressed satisfaction with Tsai’s performance declined from 81.6 percent in an Aug. 22 poll to 73.3 percent.
However, her approval rating among pan-blue respondents rose from 13.6 percent to 16.4 percent in the same period.
Despite recent calls by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus and some members of the pan-green camp for a Cabinet reshuffle, 56.2 percent of those polled opposed the idea of Premier Lin Chuan (林全) stepping down.
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Wang Ting-yu (王定宇) said that while many people are not happy with Lin’s performance, they seem willing to give Tsai’s first premier more time to do his job, presumably for the sake of political stability.
“Nevertheless, should Lin fail to timely prove his competence, he could face overwhelming pressure from the public for him to quit,” Wang Ting-yu said.
DPP Legislator Lo Chih-cheng (羅致政) said the poll indicated that people are practical and reasonable when it comes to pension reform, as they do not seem to harbor unrealistic expectations about the pensions they are entitled to.
Presidential Office spokesman Alex Huang (黃重諺) said the government’s goal is to ensure retirement security and quality of life for every citizen, and urged people to work together to make the nation’s pension systems more sustainable.
The telephone-based poll was conducted between Tuesday and Thursday last week by the Great Society Survey Center for the foundation.
It collected 1,075 valid samples among Taiwanese aged 20 or above and has a margin of error of 2.99 percentage points.
US climber Alex Honnold is to attempt to scale Taipei 101 without a rope and harness in a live Netflix special on Jan. 24, the streaming platform announced on Wednesday. Accounting for the time difference, the two-hour broadcast of Honnold’s climb, called Skyscraper Live, is to air on Jan. 23 in the US, Netflix said in a statement. Honnold, 40, was the first person ever to free solo climb the 900m El Capitan rock formation in Yosemite National Park — a feat that was recorded and later made into the 2018 documentary film Free Solo. Netflix previewed Skyscraper Live in October, after videos
NUMBERS IMBALANCE: More than 4 million Taiwanese have visited China this year, while only about half a million Chinese have visited here Beijing has yet to respond to Taiwan’s requests for negotiation over matters related to the recovery of cross-strait tourism, the Tourism Administration said yesterday. Taiwan’s tourism authority issued the statement after Chinese-language daily the China Times reported yesterday that the government’s policy of banning group tours to China does not stop Taiwanese from visiting the country. As of October, more than 4.2 million had traveled to China this year, exceeding last year. Beijing estimated the number of Taiwanese tourists in China could reach 4.5 million this year. By contrast, only 500,000 Chinese tourists are expected in Taiwan, the report said. The report
Temperatures are forecast to drop steadily as a continental cold air mass moves across Taiwan, with some areas also likely to see heavy rainfall, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. From today through early tomorrow, a cold air mass would keep temperatures low across central and northern Taiwan, and the eastern half of Taiwan proper, with isolated brief showers forecast along Keelung’s north coast, Taipei and New Taipei City’s mountainous areas and eastern Taiwan, it said. Lows of 11°C to 15°C are forecast in central and northern Taiwan, Yilan County, and the outlying Kinmen and Lienchiang (Matsu) counties, and 14°C to 17°C
STEERING FAILURE: The first boat of its class is experiencing teething issues as it readies for acceptance by the navy, according to a recent story about rudder failure The Hai Kun (海鯤), the nation’s first locally built submarine, allegedly suffered a total failure of stern hydraulic systems during the second round of sea acceptance trials on June 26, and sailors were forced to manually operate the X-rudder to turn the submarine and return to port, news Web site Mirror Daily reported yesterday. The report said that tugboats following the Hai Kun assisted the submarine in avoiding collisions with other ships due to the X-rudder malfunctioning. At the time of the report, the submarine had completed its trials and was scheduled to begin diving and surfacing tests in shallow areas. The X-rudder,
RSS