Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Solomon203/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
A PROPOSAL BY the KMT in late December would exempt seniors who pay under 20% income tax from needing to pay premiums to the National Health Insurance (NHI) system.
Those who pay 20% in income tax are those who make above 1,330,000 NT per year. Those who make below 590,000 NT per year pay a 5% income tax premium.
The KMT later amended the idea to only exempt seniors who pay under 5% in income tax. The Ministry of Health and Welfare had warned that the proposal would lead to a loss of 54 billion NT for the NHI each year.
Taiwan’s universal health insurance system enjoys bipartisan support. Nevertheless, the KMT would be aiming to please a core support demographic for the party, that of elderly privileged individuals.
This proves similar to how a core support base for the KMT was public servants, teachers, police, and veterans, who were paid a generous 18% preferential saving rate on their pensions in return for political loyalty. When the Tsai administration moved to cut pensions to prevent the pension system from going bankrupt, such groups protested.
A similar proposal aimed to lower medical requirement evaluations for elderly hiring migrant workers. This move, too, has been warned as potentially leading to too many elderly individuals, including those who may not need assistance, hiring migrant workers. But the KMT may simply aim to please its base.
Recent moves by the KMT aimed at diverting money away from the central government and to local governments it supports will also lead to the end of rental subsidies for 750,000 individuals. This occurs despite the fact that housing remains unaffordable for most young people at a time of long working hours and low salaries. To afford a home in Taipei, one would have to not eat or drink for fifteen years.
Given that it is impossible for most young people to afford a home, the KMT and DPP both called for speeding up the construction of social housing. Still, with many local governments controlled by the KMT, and issues in coordination with the DPP-led central government, some past proposals have been for both local and central governments to divide up the labor of constructing social housing.
Photo credit: Solomon203/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
It is unusual, then, that the KMT seems to have abandoned the idea, or remembered that the party should try to appeal to young people. The party may have decided to commit to its base of elderly individuals. Otherwise, it is possible that with Fu Kun-chi in charge of the KMT legislative caucus, and responsible for moves such as wide-ranging infrastructure bills for Taiwan’s east coast aimed at benefiting his local political network but risking the fiscal stability of the national budget, the KMT has lost sight of what would otherwise seem like political priorities.
With the KMT attacking the national budget as wasteful out of efforts to prevent the DPP from realizing any sort of social program, one proposal to solve fiscal issues would be to increase taxes on the wealthy. But it is clear with the KMT’s moves on healthcare that it would have no interest in a move that could alienate a core constituency for the party.
With the rise of the Bluebird Movement earlier this year, one sees a historical echo of the Sunflower Movement of a decade prior. Nonetheless, one notes that one of the reasons why protests broke out and escalated so quickly ten years ago was because young people felt a powerful sense of disenfranchisement.
This sense of disenfranchisement was rooted in the view that the KMT had sold out the future of Taiwanese youth to the powerful and elite of society, whose economic interest was in facilitating closer political ties with China. In this sense, in many ways, the KMT seems like it is further setting itself up for a repetition of ten years ago.
Perhaps the party has never learned, or it may be that it is compelled to repeat the actions of ten years before. Indeed, moves such as seeking to reintroduce the Cross-Strait Services Trade Agreement that the Sunflower Movement protested against in the 2024 presidential election cycle or otherwise steamroll controversial bills into law illustrate that the KMT seems to have learned little from the recent past. And so history may repeat.