by Brian Hioe

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Photo Credit: Fu Kun-chi/Facebook

WITH RECENT WIDE-RANGING budget cuts passed by the KMT, the KMT has sought to defend the cuts as necessary for fiscal security in Taiwan. To this extent, the KMT has claimed that the cuts only amount to 3% of the budget and that such budget-cutting also occurred during the Tsai administration. By contrast, President Lai Ching-te of the DPP has framed the cuts and freezes as amounting to 30% of the available funding.

There have never been cuts on this scale in the past twenty-five years, showing that against the claims of the KMT, such budget-cutting is not normal in the legislature. The DPP has stated that the impact of the cuts being 30% of funding refers to funding that the government actually has available to use in the next year, not the total amount of funds, as subsidies to local governments cannot be changed in the budget. In this sense, the DPP has criticized the KMT’s framing of the cuts are only a mere 3% as a claim meant to mislead.

Either way, the point has never been the amount of the overall budget that is cut, but what programs are to be cut. In an effort to mislead, the KMT has adjusted its legislation as to what cuts it proposes numerous times, refusing to publicize the draft legislation ahead of time and keeping it under wraps until immediately before voting. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Culture, Mainland Affairs Council, Ministry of Digital Affairs, and an expansive slate of other government bodies will see drastic cuts.

Facebook post with the KMT with their framing of the cuts as 3%

The KMT may be hoping to return to the political obstructionism that it engaged in during Chen Shui-bian’s presidential administration, in the hopes that it would lead to a similar ouster of Lai. Still, the KMT is likely miscalculating when it comes to political shifts in the past decade. For one, pressing legislation into law by shutting the opposition out of being physically present for voting–rather than simply outvoting them–is likely to prompt outrage. And the cuts are higher than any that took place during the Chen administration.

A decade ago, a key factor that led to the emergence of the Sunflower Movement was anger over the KMT skipping committee review to pass the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement in thirty seconds. In the ten years since, the demand for transparency from the government has only increased–indeed, in 2014, there was no live streaming of events in the legislature or any call for Taiwan to have the equivalent of C-SPAN in the US. It was much more tenable to claim that the details of trade agreements were best left in the hands of politicians and technocrats and that the general public did not need to know.

Still, the KMT’s actions in the past year undermine its claim to care about Taiwan’s fiscal security. The KMT’s budgetary proposals led to the approval of a 2.93 trillion NT budget that froze or cut 207.5 billion NT from the original version of the budget.

Yet last year, the KMT attempted to pass an infrastructure bill to extend the high-speed rail, build an expressway, and extend National Freeway 6 across eastern Taiwan, the home constituency of KMT legislative caucus leader Fu Kun-chi.

Facebook post by the DPP emphasizing their claim of the budget cuts as 30% of available funding to the government

The price of the three projects combined would have cost 1.5 trillion NT to 2.5 trillion NT, equivalent to three infrastructure projects that would have mostly benefited Fu’s home constituency. Such infrastructure spending amounts to close to the entire national budget for next year and is some ten times more than the amount that the KMT sought to freeze from the national budget.

Moreover, many questioned the need for such infrastructure when 90% of Taiwan’s population lives on the western coast–and even the currently existing high-speed rail on the western coast required government subsidies to finish construction. Critics have further warned for years that increased tourism to Taiwan’s eastern coast as allowed for by high-speed rail could destroy its delicate ecosystem.

Indeed, the infrastructure called for by the bill would have passed through eleven Indigenous villages, agricultural areas, and geologically sensitive areas such as the East Rift Valley and Dulan Mountain. The bill was criticized as unconstitutional because consent from these Indigenous communities, who would face possible displacement, had not been sought before the proposal.

Chart from The Reporter showing the scale of the cuts compared to in the past twenty-five years

By contrast, the Tsai administration’s Forward-Looking Infrastructure Bill cost 800 billion NT but was spread across hundreds of projects rather than just three projects focused on one constituency. The KMT eventually backed away from Fu’s infrastructure proposal, likely because KMT legislators became aware that infrastructure improvements for their own constituencies would be crowded out by vast spending only on constituencies in such a way as to benefit Fu–allowing Fu to strengthen his patronage networks even further in Hualien and the eastern coast of Taiwan.

It also proves a bizarre proposition for the KMT to significantly cut Taiwan’s defense budget, funding for the Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Digital Affairs, and Council of Indigenous Peoples this year, but call for the construction of an unnecessary high-speed rail system last year–as though apparently it was more importantly to build a high-speed rail system on eastern Taiwan than spend on defense projects such as submarines and drones, or funding the Council of Indigenous Peoples that serves to politically represent Indigenous often residing in eastern Taiwan. And that the KMT attempted to the equivalent of the entire national budget for last year on three infrastructure projects that would have only benefited eastern Taiwan, spending literally ten times more than any cuts that the KMT was able to push through this year, belies any claim that the KMT is interested in fiscal security. All this seems par for the course in the KMT’s ongoing power grab then.

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