This year’s government budget has been significantly cut and frozen by opposition legislators, leading to administrative and operational difficulties and further contributing to the public’s dissatisfaction toward the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). Although many operational difficulties have already emerged across various government departments, the opposition continues to distort the truth, claiming that its cutting and withholding of the budget has had minimal impact on government agencies. As a result, some citizens have been misled into believing that the effects of the KMT’s budget cuts are being exaggerated, sowing discord among the public.
There are several examples of the KMT’s distorted messaging. The opposition says the overall budget still increased despite the cuts, but fails to mention how it deliberately cut some utility expenses and operational costs, along with prohibiting the reallocation of budget funds — all of which have caused difficulties for government agencies.
On Monday, Minister of Foreign Affairs Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) confirmed that budget cuts and freezes have led to a limited supply of passports, and that the Bureau of Consular Affairs would not be able to print more passports by October. Yet somehow, the facts have been twisted: “If people already paid the NT$1,300 passport fee, how could there not be enough money to print more passports?” Such claims take advantage of the general public’s lack of understanding of the government’s budgeting systems, to spread disinformation.
Public budgets do not operate on a for-profit structure, nor are they responsible for their own financing, and they rarely balance revenues and expenditures. The NT$1,300 passport application fees go directly into the national treasury, while passport printing expenses are covered by the public budget. Thus, cuts to the public budget directly reduce the total number of passports that can be printed, which would naturally lead to a shortage. It is not a matter of whether the NT$1,300 passport application fee is enough to cover the cost of printing a passport, because that is simply not the way funds are allocated.
Addressing the shortage of passports — which is estimated to be about 150,000 to 200,000 this year — would inevitably require a budget increase in the future. However, what the public really wants to understand is, on what grounds did opposition legislators cut the budget to begin with? Why, without any factual basis, did the KMT resort to a blanket 10 percent cut, which affected the budget for printing passports?
This is why the public is dissatisfied with the KMT, and one of the main reasons so many citizens support the mass recall movement. It is not that the budget should not be cut — rather, it should not have been cut so frivolously, much less intentionally slashed to the point that government agencies struggle to function. Taxpayers elect legislators to adequately manage public funds on their behalf, not enact revenge against the government. Arbitrary budget cuts are by no means a way of tightening the purse strings — they are just spiteful vengeance.
Some people mistakenly believe that the funds from passport application fees can be directly used to print passports. Some media outlets have not only failed to correct the misinformation, but even fanned the flames by fueling its spread. These media outlets are not only contravening journalistic integrity and social responsibility, but have become accomplices in the spread of fake news.
Wang Chih-chien is a distinguished professor at National Taipei University’s Graduate Institute of Information Management.
Translated by Kyra Gustavsen
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