In a long-awaited move to address the ever-increasing wealth gap in Taiwan, the Executive Yuan yesterday eased restrictions on subsidies to economically disadvantaged people, officials said.
Under the Cabinet’s amendment to the Social Assistance Act (社會救助法), the number of households living under a redefined poverty line — or “low-income families” — would increase by 52,000 people in 21,000 households. At present, 264,000 people in 108,000 households, or 1.36 of the population, fall into this category.
The draft also proposed defining in the act “middle-to-low-income families” to legally conceptualize the category currently defined in different ways in rules and regulations and to ensure that existing subsidies would be legally protected.
About 536,000 people in 183,000 households will be categorized as “middle-to-low-income families,” which, together with “low-income families,” would bring the number of people covered by the act to 852,000 in 312,000 households, or 3.68 percent of the population.
At present, the poverty line is set at 60 percent of the average per capita monthly living expenditure of a given administrative area over the most recent statistical year, with some restrictions relating to ownership of personal assets and real estate, among others.
If the amendment passes the legislature the standard would be defined as 60 percent of the median disposable income per capita per month of a given administrative area over the latest statistical year.
The new poverty line in the five administrative areas — Taipei City, Kaohsiung City, Lienchiang County, Kinmen County and Taiwan Province, which includes the remainder of cities and counties on the Taiwanese mainland — however, would be subject to a ceiling of 70 percent of the national median disposable income per capita.
At a press conference following the Cabinet meeting, Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) said each of the five administrative areas would have a new poverty line “higher than the current one by a range of between NT$400 [US$12.60] and more than NT$1,000.”
Citing Taipei City as an example, Chiang said the minimum living expense standard was supposed to be lifted from NT$14,614 at present to NT$16,793 after the adjustment.
“However, because of the ceiling restrictions, the new poverty line in Taipei City could be less than NT$16,793,” Chiang said.
Without a clear-cut legal definition of “middle-to-low-income households,” different government agencies apply various criteria to hand out subsidies to people living in middle-to-low-income families: Households whose average per capita income exceeds the minimum living expenses standard, but is no greater than two-and-a-half times the standard for the family’s area of residence.
To standardize the definition, the amendment stipulated that “middle-to-low-income households” would be defined as households whose average per capita income exceeds the poverty line, but is not greater than 1.5 times that standard for the family’s region of residence.
Chiang said the adjustments would cost the government an additional NT$4.35 billion in the first year of its implementation, expected to be 2012.
Reacting to the news, Taiwan Fund for Families and Children chairman Lin Po-jung (林柏榕) praised the revisions, but said the government should do more to help families living in poverty.
“The government must be very careful when putting the ideas behind the revision into practice and come up with more policies to help these families become financially independent,” Lin said.
While the government intends to include more people under welfare coverage, Lin said, the revisions could face some challenges in practice.
“Despite what the law says, most local governments — besides Taipei and Kaohsiung cities — do not have concrete policy plans to help economically disadvantaged families to become financially independent,” Lin said.
Meanwhile, Democratic Progressive Party legislators Huang Wei-cher (黃偉哲) and Wong Chin-chu (翁金珠) said they hoped the plan wasn’t just another “election gimmick” to gain votes for the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in the November special municipality elections.
ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY LOA IOK-SIN AND YAN JUO-CHIN
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS