The Alliance for Fair Tax Reform (公平稅改聯盟) yesterday said the nation’s debt actually amounted to NT$919,000 (US$31,365) per person as of the end of last month, not NT$209,000 per person as cited by the Ministry of Finance (MOF).
The ministry began publishing a Web-based “National Debt Clock” in December as a way of reminding government agencies to monitor their spending.
“The national debt information released by the ministry was incomplete and unclear,” Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), convener of the alliance, told a media briefing.
The ministry’s national debt calculation only includes regular short-term and long-term debt, which totaled NT$4.85 trillion, or NT$209,000 per person, as of the end of last month, the ministry’s data showed.
However, the actual amount of public debt — as defined by the IMF — should include potential national debt and debt from “non-enterprise funds,” the alliance said in a statement.
The non-enterprise funds, also known as non-profit government funds, are used by the government to support infrastructure projects and social welfare programs.
The alliance said potential national debt was about NT$15.71 trillion as of the end of last month, while the debt from non-enterprise funds totaled NT$579.5 billion, data showed.
With these two parts included, the national debt would come to NT$919,000 per person, Wang said.
“The ministry should include the potential national debt, debt from non-enterprise funds and local government debt in future National Debt Clock calculations to provide accurate information to the public,” Wang said.
The National Treasury Agency said the National Debt Clock figures were based on public debt regulations that only count outstanding short-term debt and outstanding debt with a maturity of more than one year.
As for potential national debt, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics is responsible for releasing the information, the agency said in a note yesterday.
Thomas Lee (李桐豪), a finance professor at National Chengchi University, said regardless of which figure should be used, the government should focus more on solving the nation’s actual financial problems.
“Even if the regulations do not include potential national debt and debt from non-enterprise funds, these debts still exist. The ministry should come up with more measures to collect money for the country,” Lee said by telephone.
The government should think about imposing a capital gains tax, as well as a possible levy on income from overseas Taiwanese businesspeople, to improve the government’s financial conditions, Lee said.
GEOPOLITICAL ISSUES? The economics ministry said that political factors should not affect supply chains linking global satellite firms and Taiwanese manufacturers Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) asked Taiwanese suppliers to transfer manufacturing out of Taiwan, leading to some relocating portions of their supply chain, according to sources employed by and close to the equipment makers and corporate documents. A source at a company that is one of the numerous subcontractors that provide components for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite Internet products said that SpaceX asked their manufacturers to produce outside of Taiwan because of geopolitical risks, pushing at least one to move production to Vietnam. A second source who collaborates with Taiwanese satellite component makers in the nation said that suppliers were directly
Top Taiwanese officials yesterday moved to ease concern about the potential fallout of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, making a case that the technology restrictions promised by the former US president against China would outweigh the risks to the island. The prospect of Trump’s victory in this week’s election is a worry for Taipei given the Republican nominee in the past cast doubt over the US commitment to defend it from Beijing. But other policies championed by Trump toward China hold some appeal for Taiwan. National Development Council Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) described the proposed technology curbs as potentially having
EXPORT CONTROLS: US lawmakers have grown more concerned that the US Department of Commerce might not be aggressively enforcing its chip restrictions The US on Friday said it imposed a US$500,000 penalty on New York-based GlobalFoundries Inc, the world’s third-largest contract chipmaker, for shipping chips without authorization to an affiliate of blacklisted Chinese chipmaker Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯). The US Department of Commerce in a statement said GlobalFoundries sent 74 shipments worth US$17.1 million to SJ Semiconductor Corp (盛合晶微半導體), an affiliate of SMIC, without seeking a license. Both SMIC and SJ Semiconductor were added to the department’s trade restriction Entity List in 2020 over SMIC’s alleged ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex. SMIC has denied wrongdoing. Exports to firms on the list
TALENT FACTOR: The nation’s chip sector would be difficult to replace, but to maintain that advantage, Taiwan must retain skilled workers, an academic said A group of experts on Sunday called on Taiwan to strive to maintain its world-leading position in the semiconductor industry, with a US-China chip dispute expected to continue regardless of who becomes the next US president. Tamkang University Graduate Institute of International Affairs and Strategic Studies director Li Da-jung (李大中) said at a Taipei seminar on global semiconductor security that the relationship between the two superpowers would remain confrontational. There appears to be “no turning back” in US-China relations, as US presidential candidates US Vice President Kamala Harris and former US president Donald Trump are both expected to continue Washington’s hawkish stance
RSS