Over the past few months, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party legislators have often asserted that the government has overtaxed citizens, and that they would “return the money to the people” through universal cash handouts. As an academic who researches public finance and government budgeting, I believe the universal cash handouts are neither legal nor logical.
Such a move would likely impose a heavy burden on the National Treasury Administration. If the handouts are written into law, they could be detrimental to the long-term health of the nation’s finances.
First, a tax surplus, what the opposition has framed as “overtaxation,” simply means that the tax revenue collected in a given year exceeded the government’s expectations; it does not mean that the government imposed excess taxes or collected more money from taxpayers than it should have.
The opposition’s notion that the money must be “returned to the people” is entirely unfounded and, naturally, fails to provide a legitimate justification for universal cash handouts.
Second, Article 70 of the Constitution stipulates that the Legislative Yuan “shall not make proposals for an increase in the expenditures in the budgetary bill presented by the Executive Yuan.” In proposing that the government distribute universal cash handouts, legislators are already overstepping their legal authority and contravening the Constitution.
More importantly, the central government had an outstanding debt exceeding NT$5.8 trillion (US$198.6 billion) as of July 4. Even if tax revenue temporarily exceeded the government’s expectations, the funds should be used to pay down the national debt, strengthen the social safety net or support important government functions such as education, national defense and long-term care.
Only when a government is free of its debt burden and has a fiscal surplus — as is the case with the local governments of Chiayi City, and Kinmen and Lienchiang (Matsu) counties — is it appropriate to consider sharing economic gains through universal cash handouts.
Even if the goal is to stimulate the economy, that could be achieved with the distribution of limited time-use consumption coupons and should only be considered during a severe economic downturn. Cash handouts are not only limited in their effectiveness, but might also pose a heavy financial burden.
If legislators force through universal cash handouts without any comprehensive planning or legal basis, the move — while attractive on the surface — could crowd out other government expenditures and lead to the misallocation of fiscal resources.
Liao Wei-jie is an assistant professor of public management at the City University of New York John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Translated by Kyra Gustavsen
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
RSS