The Dual Anti-Pandemic Layout Program for Emergency Relief and Revitalization

The Dual Anti-Pandemic Layout Program for Emergency Relief and Revitalization

United Daily News Editorial (Taipei, Taiwan)

April 12, 2020

 Translation of an Excerpt

The calamity of the new coronavirus pneumonia has been spreading from public health to the economic arenas; various countries are valiantly battling on two frontlines of countering the pandemic and salvaging the economy. The former concerns human lives, and the latter maintains the economic bloodline. With the development of the pandemic situation, various countries follow one another in proclaiming large-scale economic bailout programs by upping the ante once or twice. The Tsai government has also hugely adjusted the scale of the economic bailout from NT$60 billion to as high as NT$1.05 trillion, and emphasized that it could up the ante more. However, we must remind the government that bailouts are not a race for spending money; whether resources have been injected, in a timely fashion, into the right place is the crux of fighting and winning the anti-pandemic war on the economic front.

Viewed from the fact that the number of furloughed laborers in recent months has endlessly reached new eight-year highs, this economic tsunami has taken shape, but the government's program for coping with the economy has nevertheless still been mostly on paper. Whether the anti-pandemic relief may succeed, the emergency relief and revitalization must be taken care of at the same time. The former is to help our countrymen to tide over the current dire straits, and the latter is to help the country find a new post-pandemic economic path. However, right now the government is inadequate in emergency relief, while we don’t even see a direction for revitalization.

The economic bailout has become the performance stage for DPP political figures, and the bailout budget has risen from tens of billions to hundreds of billions to over a trillion. The Tsai government is elated and prideful, bragging about it as a great record of government performance. However, in recent months, we have been hearing sorrowful howling from the grassroots; restaurants, retail businesses, and tourism operators have been reporting closures or unpaid leaves for their employees, showing that the government's anti-pandemic bailout measures are basically not in place.

The scale of the revitalization program has been determined; our countrymen care more about how we are going to employ these limited resources. The Tsai government must assess anew how to employ the bailout resources amounting to $1.05 trillion, achieving an equilibrium between emergency relief and revitalization.

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