Mon, Jan 20, 2025 page3

• Legislators debate budget on time crunch

  UNUSUAL CUTS: The legislature on average only cut previous administrations’ central budget by about one-third of the cut the opposition is currently proposing, the DPP said

  • By Hsieh Chun-lin, Shih Hsiao-kuang and Sam Garcia / Staff reporters, with staff writer
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  Legislators are today and tomorrow to continue deliberating over about 800 budget-related proposals as they aim to finish a review of the central government’s budget before the legislative session ends tomorrow.

  Ruling and opposition parties continued to debate the central government’s proposed 2025 budget with total expenditures of more than NT$3.13 trillion (US$95.1 billion).

  On Friday, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their majority in the Legislative Yuan to cut NT$93.98 billion from the central government’s general budget.

  

  The KMT has proposed cutting a total of NT$111 billion, or 3.47 percent, from the budget.

  Under the recently amended Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法), the central government must allocate NT$375.3 billion annually to local governments, affecting 28 percent of the budget, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics has said.

  If national defense expenditures are not reduced, it would affect 37 percent of the budget, it added.

  Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus chief executive Rosalia Wu (吳思瑤) yesterday said that in the 16 years of the administrations of former presidents Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), the legislature on average cut the central budget by just 1.19 percent, about one-third of the opposition parties’ proposed 3.47 percent cut, the largest to the budget in history.

  The opposition has been obstructing the central government from fulfilling its policy commitments and encroaching on the Executive Yuan’s budgetary authority, she said.

  “Budget oversight should be rational,” but the opposition’s proposals “are driven by a desire to make governance difficult for the administration,” Wu said.

  KMT Secretary-General Justin Huang (黃健庭) said that even with the 3.47 percent budget cut, President William Lai’s (賴清德) administration would still have a budget of NT$2.8 trillion to NT$2.9 trillion.

  “This administration is incompetent,” he said, adding that previous administrations operated fine with a budget of about NT$2 trillion.

  The central government under the DPP has wasted a significant amount of money and if the legislature did not conduct a thorough review, “we would be failing in our duties,” he said.

  TPP Acting Chairman and caucus whip Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) on Thursday last week said that his caucus proposed cutting NT$200 billion and freezing NT$100 billion of the budget, accounting for about 10 percent of its total.

  The opposition parties are fulfilling their duty by conducting a thorough review of a record-high budget, he said.

  Huang Kuo-chang said that pro-DPP media and DPP legislators were spreading disinformation by claiming that legislators from opposition parties want to paralyze the government.

  In 2012, Tsai, then-DPP chairperson, wrote on Facebook that government agencies’ budgets should be cut by 20 percent, he said.

  “As a former minister, I know the government and ministries could still function with a 10 percent budget cut,” he said Tsai had written.

  It is contradictory that Tsai could make such a statement and yet the TPP is being accused of paralyzing the government for its proposed budget cuts, he said.
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