Band-aid-Style Bailout Policy Is Squandering People's Money

 Band-aid-Style Bailout Policy Is Squandering People's Money

United Daily News Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

March 12, 2020

 Translation of an Excerpt

The Cabinet proposed a special budget of NT$60 billion for bailing out industries and revitalizing the economy in order to cope with the COVID-19 epidemic; the bill passed the Legislative Yuan in the first reading and was reported out of committees on March 9^th. As always, the Tsai government's approach has been to draw a big cake of budget, then ask the Cabinet ministries or local governments to fight for shares of the cake with programs, and eventually the central government determines according to needs or by political affinities.

This time, the bailout program is a special budget; initially the DPP’s action plan was not very proactive. After the KMT exerted pressure by initiating a bill titled the “Special Statute Governing Bailout Programs”, the DPP jumped on the wagon, and upped the ante to NT$60 billion from NT$50 billion in scale. Observe the various bailout budgets for epidemic prevention by different Cabinet ministries, the largest sum is concentrated in three ministries, in the order of the Economics Ministry, NT$20.4 billion, the Ministry of Health and Welfare, NT$17 billion, and the Ministry of Transportation and Communications, NT$16.7 billion, taking up a 90% lion’s share of the special budget. The Labor Ministry’s bailout program budget is virtually zero, among which it only listed NT$800 million for expenditures for "personnel training and transformation", which was especially eyebrow-raising.

Observing other countries’ measures, they mostly provide loans and tax reductions to industries as the main points, provide risk subsidies or on-duty special subsidies to medical and nursing staff, and grant compensation to members of the public who collaborate with special epidemic prevention needs. Looking back at this country, the measures for bailout and revitalization, nevertheless, still stayed at the level of subsidies for everything, strengthening cultivation, issuing "consumption coupons", and along outdated thinking, being measures akin to “distant water cannot put out the fire nearby”, as the Chinese saying goes. This kind of "band-aid-style" bailout policy is only squandering money!

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