Tue, Jan 02, 2024 page3

• 2024 Elections: Taiwan FactCheck Center assesses candidates’ claims

  • Staff Writer, with CNA
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  The three presidential candidates each made erroneous or misleading claims during their debate on Saturday, a Taiwan FactCheck Center analysis showed.

  The center flagged a number of statements made by the candidates that it labeled as accurate, inaccurate or lacking in necessary context.

  It said the Democratic Presidential Party’s presidential candidate Vice President William Lai (賴清德) had criticized an opponent’s support for nuclear power by arguing that Taiwan was already generating more energy from renewable sources than from nuclear power.

  The center said Lai’s claim was supported by Energy Administration data, which showed that from January through October of last year, renewables accounted for 8.9 percent of Taiwan’s energy mix, compared to 6.3 percent for nuclear power.

  Meanwhile, during a segment on the economy, Taiwan People’s Party Chairman and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) claimed that while the nation’s GDP had risen 120 percent since 2000, its real wages had only risen by 4 percent, and its average working hours remained the sixth-highest in the world.

  The center said Ko’s statement “did not correspond with its data,” which showed that Taiwan’s economy had grown by 130 percent since 2000, while real wages in the industrial and service sectors grew by 9.8 percent.

  In terms of working hours, Taiwan ranked sixth-highest in a review of 39 countries conducted by the Ministry of Labor earlier last year, not the sixth-highest in the entire world, the fact checking organization said.

  Ko also said during the debate that Taiwan in recent years had experienced shortages of “water, electricity, labor, land, talent, eggs, COVID-19 rapid tests, vaccines and toilet paper.”

  The center flagged this statement for “omitting key facts” on the grounds that two major toilet paper “shortages” were caused by panic buying.

  A run on toilet paper in February 2018 was later found to have originated from false advertising by a major supermarket chain, while another such incident during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 was caused by misinformation spread online, it said.

  The center also called out the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate, New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜), saying he had failed to provide adequate context when he said the government had rejected his call to test all arriving travelers for COVID-19 early on in the pandemic.

  Although Hou did propose testing arriving passengers for COVID-19 in March 2020, the center said, many public health experts at the time were concerned that large numbers of false positive test results could have overburdened Taiwan’s medical system.

  Meanwhile, on financial issues, the center said that Lai’s assertion that the government had paid off NT$900 billion (US$29.3 billion) from the national debt during President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) time in office was off by about NT$100 billion.

  According to Ministry of Finance data, about NT$670 billion in debt was paid off by the government from 2016 to 2022, while another NT$126 billion was paid off last year, adding up to a total of NT$796 billion, the center said.

  The center backed Ko’s contention that the Tsai government’s budget surpluses and payments against the national debt were made possible through the use of separate “special budgets” and by counting government borrowing as a source of income.

  Citing experts it consulted on the issue, the center confirmed that borrowing was counted as government income, and that special budgets — which have been used for national defense, the response to COVID-19 and a major infrastructure program — are not included in the general budget.
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