DELAY: This year’s budget, which is 351 days late, still has not been submitted to the president although the legislature passed it last month, the premier saidBy Chen Yu-fu, Lin Hsin-han and Jonathan Chin / Staff reporters, with staff writer請繼續往下閱讀...The Legislative Yuan has not submitted this year’s general budget to the president for signature, despite having passed it more than a month ago, Premier Cho Jung-tai （卓榮泰） said yesterday, while the Chinese Nationalist Party （KMT） accused Cho of stoking political discontent.The budget is 351 days late.“We are waiting on the budget with bated breath,” Cho told a news conference. “I can only tell my colleagues to hang on.”The government needs President William Lai’s （賴清德） signature on the budget to fund the already-approved supplementary budgets to increase government worker wages and improve welfare benefits.KMT caucus deputy secretary-general Hsu Yu-chen （許宇甄） said the premier presents the events surrounding the late budget out of context to manufacture discontent.“The government is using the lack of funding as a tool to incite the people’s anger against the opposition parties,” she said.“If the Democratic Progressive Party [DPP] cares about the well-being of 3.9 million people affected by the delay, it should tell them the truth,” she said.KMT Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu （韓國瑜） had proposed on Aug. 26 that the legislature send the budget to the government before the new legislative session begins on Sept. 29, as it needed time to organize the budget and other important matters, Hsu said.The DPP caucus had agreed to this arrangement, and the government has no grounds to complain about it, she added.“The government, in an act of collective amnesia, is misrepresenting the facts to paint the legislature as boycotting the budget,” Hsu said.Hsu also accused the media of publishing false stories about the KMT’s and the Taiwan People’s Party’s approach to the budget, saying that the press is failing its duty to monitor the government.A Cabinet official with knowledge of the matter confirmed that the government has not received the approved budget.The legislature’s failure to file has ramifications for the implementation schedule of proposed supplementary budgets, they said.The Cabinet on Sept. 3 proposed a NT$607.63 billion （US$19.08 billion） supplementary budget, which is to increase subsidies for older farmers to NT$10,000 from NT$8,110, and the national pension’s maximum monthly payout to NT$6,715, up from NT$5,437. Those allocations would benefit 530,000 and 1.76 million people respectively.The supplementary budget additionally includes a 23.5 percent increase to subsidies for mentally or physically disabled people, impoverished older people, disadvantaged children, low-income households and students from poor families, the official said.These subsidies are to be paid retroactively from July 1, with an estimated 890,000 beneficiaries, they said.The supplementary budget would give government workers a monthly pay raise, benefiting 720,000 military service members, civil servants, educators and people in supervisory positions.Since supplementary budgets can only be activated on top of a general budget already allocated for the year, lawmakers would not be able to discuss those proposals until after Sept. 29.The portion of the general budget that could not be utilized totals NT$299.2 billion.新聞來源：TAIPEI TIMES
评论 (0)