The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) caucus yesterday urged the government to pass its budget soon and observe fiscal discipline in helping Taiwanese weather inflation woes.
Calling “inflation” the word of the year, the caucus told a news conference at the legislature in Taipei that economic issues are gradually eroding people’s livelihoods.
Consumer prices have steadily risen throughout the year, TPP Legislator Lai Hsiang-ling (賴香伶) said.
Photo: Lo Pei-te, Taipei Times
The consumer price index for last month increased 2.35 percent year-on-year, and has exceeded 2 percent over the past 16 consecutive months, she said.
Meanwhile, real regular wages fell 0.07 percent annually, she said, adding that inflation has cut into earnings and depleted people’s disposable income.
The last meeting of the Cabinet’s price stabilization committee to have publicized minutes was in August, and it only lasted an hour and was not attended by any top officials, Lai said.
The wage gap in Taiwan has grown more than sixfold since President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office in 2016, TPP Legislator Jang Chyi-lu (張其祿) said.
The Gini coefficient — a measure of income inequality in which 0 represents perfect equality and 1 extreme inequality — has reached a nine-year high at 0.341, he added.
Buying property is out of reach for most young people, yet amendments to the Equalization of Land Rights Act (平均地權條例) still languish in the legislature a year after they were proposed, he said.
Meanwhile, the government has been passive in responding to a new registration requirement for all imports into China, Jang said.
Even though it was aware of the new rule in April last year, it waited until it received a notice from the Chinese General Administration of Customs six months later to respond, he said.
The seven information sessions hastily thrown together by the Food and Drug Administration were not enough to help many producers, whose licenses have been suspended after submitting insufficient information, he said.
The government’s passiveness has dealt multiple blows to the nation’s food producers, Jang said.
If it just throws money at the problem, “it will be all Taiwanese who suffer,” he added.
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS