meanwhile, in Taiwan...

[Conley]

(such as proposing a serious capital gains tax reform, right now Taiwan only have a transaction tax on buying / selling capital asset which have long been slammed as this means folks who makes most of their money in investment rarely pay nearly as much taxes as wage earners.. hmmmm sounds familiar ) but his team have presented in terriablly naive and/or autocratic fashion, thus sending his own parties legislator up in flames (let alone opposition onces) and Taiwan's stock, already reeling like the rest of the world, only took he news even worse.

What are the tax brackets like there? What kind of CG tax do you have now and what percentage is Ma looking to raise it to? This is what ours is looking like going forward:

2003–2012					2013–
	2003–2007		2008–2012		2013–
Ordinary Income Tax Rate	Short-term Capital Gains Tax Rate	Long-term Capital Gains Tax Rate	Short-term Capital Gains Tax Rate	Long-term Capital Gains Tax Rate	Ordinary Income Tax Rate	Short-term Capital Gains Tax Rate	Long-term Capital Gains Tax Rate	5-year Capital Gains Tax Rate
10%	10%	5%	10%	0%	15%	15%	10%	8%
15%	15%	5%	15%	0%
25%	25%	15%	25%	15%	28%	28%	20%	18%
28%	28%	15%	28%	15%	31%	31%	20%	18%
33%	33%	15%	33%	15%	36%	36%	20%	18%
35%	35%	15%	35%	15%	39.6%	39.6%	20%	18%

[RollingWave]

Well in terms of income tax bracket it looks like this (very rough translation to US dollar)

(In USD, yearly income)
< 17K = 5%
17K-35K = 10%
35k- 70K = 20%
70K-141K = 30%
over 141K = 40%

Youngish wage earner usually falls in the first bracket, if your in the 3rd bracket your make a lot of money already by the standard here.

Right now we have no capital gains tax on anything except land, (which is also not a true capital gains tax either but a rather weird value added tax calculated in some arcane matter that few understand well). but stock and similar exchanges have a transaction tax which is sort of like a capital gains tax in that you pay 3% of the stock (or similar financial product's) value in taxes. but thats only upon purchase. where as capital gains tax usually is calculated upon sell. in another word the transaction tax is basically a sales tax on financial products.

The reason why Ma and his team is getting slamed is because they have been going back and forth on what they want to do. currently the purposed is something like 15% rate for profit on sale, with around 11K USD worth of basic deductable (so small time stock buyers are less effected) , but the problem of enforcing this remains questionable , and probably what's worse is that there seem to be a complete lack of cordination between the different branchs as the news of this tax plan is announced almost exactly at the same time as the announcement of the previous fuel and power tax hike, obviously horrible politics.

[Trinnity]

I'd jog to work too if gas went up that much!

Not many people can do that. My hubby has a thirty five minute drive, for example.

[RollingWave]

The good news is that since the 10% gas price hike a few months back the prices have alerady fallen to basically the same as pre-hike level. mostly thanks to the falling global crude price, so luckily for us to some extend we managed to get out of a subsidy without a huge pain period.

not so good news, the parliment voted on a bill which basically opens up American beef imports further, which have been blocked down by the oppostion using some rather annoying methods (essentially they hijacked the chairmen's seat so he can't start the proceeding. ) now they either need to use executive order to solve this (not a great precedence obviously) or open a special session to let it pass, the bill isn't too popular since it involves legalizing the import of enhanced meat from the US which have some health concerns. but it seems quite neccesary if we're to go anywhere with the US on trade talks. as unforunate as that might be.

Meanwhile the PRC announced the latest round of economic opening in cross strait relationships, mostly symbolic but still it's a move, (mostly it involves making it easier for citizen here to work and study in the PRC, and that we can export rice to China, which may or may not be helpful)

[MMC]

The good news is that since the 10% gas price hike a few months back the prices have alerady fallen to basically the same as pre-hike level. mostly thanks to the falling global crude price, so luckily for us to some extend we managed to get out of a subsidy without a huge pain period.

not so good news, the parliment voted on a bill which basically opens up American beef imports further, which have been blocked down by the oppostion using some rather annoying methods (essentially they hijacked the chairmen's seat so he can't start the proceeding. ) now they either need to use executive order to solve this (not a great precedence obviously) or open a special session to let it pass, the bill isn't too popular since it involves legalizing the import of enhanced meat from the US which have some health concerns. but it seems quite neccesary if we're to go anywhere with the US on trade talks. as unforunate as that might be.

Meanwhile the PRC announced the latest round of economic opening in cross strait relationships, mostly symbolic but still it's a move, (mostly it involves making it easier for citizen here to work and study in the PRC, and that we can export rice to China, which may or may not be helpful)

Wouldn't getting into those Chinese markets be beneficial. Once in then one can look to expand. Gas here is the same where prices have dropped.

[Trinnity]

American beef imports further, which have been blocked down by the oppostion using some rather annoying methods (essentially they hijacked the chairmen's seat so he can't start the proceeding. )

Thinking outside the box now.....maybe we can get the secret service to lock Obama out of the White House. lolololol

[RollingWave]

Thinking outside the box now.....maybe we can get the secret service to lock Obama out of the White House. lolololol

yes, but it's a very very bad precedent to set, since it wouldn't stop them from doing the same thing to other POTUS. it generally violates the fundemental concept of democracy if the side that can't get their agenda across by the rule decides to do it outside of the rule.

Wouldn't getting into those Chinese markets be beneficial. Once in then one can look to expand. Gas here is the same where prices have dropped.

We're already in China big time forever, Taiwan is the single largest foreign invester in China since the 80s and still is (it just doesn't "count" as foreign investment ) it's just that, these moves announced last week is basically tiny in the scope of what we're already operating in China anway. Foxconn for example is a pure Taiwanese company. and it hires more Chinese than most country have people (not much of an exaggeration, Foxconn has a staff of at least 1.2 million people!!!!! majority of them are mainland Chinese on assembly lines)

A truely significant change in scope would be a FTA between th two side, or something equalling that, it's the same thing with Taiwan and the US, the economic relationship is already huge between the two side to make it sigifnicantly bigger requires pretty drastic measures.

[Trinnity]

Thinking outside the box now.....maybe we can get the secret service to lock Obama out of the White House. lolololol

yes, but it's a very very bad precedent to set, since it wouldn't stop them from doing the same thing to other POTUS. it generally violates the fundemental concept of democracy if the side that can't get their agenda across by the rule decides to do it outside of the rule.

Uhhhhh, I was just kidding.

[MMC]

yes, but it's a very very bad precedent to set, since it wouldn't stop them from doing the same thing to other POTUS. it generally violates the fundemental concept of democracy if the side that can't get their agenda across by the rule decides to do it outside of the rule.



We're already in China big time forever, Taiwan is the single largest foreign invester in China since the 80s and still is (it just doesn't "count" as foreign investment ) it's just that, these moves announced last week is basically tiny in the scope of what we're already operating in China anway. Foxconn for example is a pure Taiwanese company. and it hires more Chinese than most country have people (not much of an exaggeration, Foxconn has a staff of at least 1.2 million people!!!!! majority of them are mainland Chinese on assembly lines)

A truely significant change in scope would be a FTA between th two side, or something equalling that, it's the same thing with Taiwan and the US, the economic relationship is already huge between the two side to make it sigifnicantly bigger requires pretty drastic measures.

What is Foxxconn into that requires them to keep a staff so large? Moreover do you see Taiwan and the rest of the East looking at what is taking place in the EU? Isn't the East looking to trade more with the likes of Vietnam and or I should say more robustly with each other? Looking more to the US and South America?

What about South Korea and their expanding Economy?

[RollingWave]

Foxconn is basically the king of the assembly line, a very very large portion of the world's electronics are assembled by them, including things like Iphones, Play Stations, Xbox, just to name some, so chances are you used a few Foxconn assembled stuff in your life.

Most of the assembly are done with a very large degree of manuel labor, taking advantage of the very large and relatively cheap pool of workers in China, they have huge factories (essentially a freaking city by itself) where hundreds upon hundreds of folks assemble various parts of those electronics into finished parts.

They started out in Taiwan doing mostly the same stuff, but obviously you can not achieve that sort of crazy scale without being in China, they also have operations in Eastern Europe and soon to be South America. they have a huge advantage in terms of production of scale, as they're basically the only company that has the capacity to handle big product assemblies, if you don't go to them then you need to find several other company at the same time which runs a higher risk of one of them messing up.

And of course, when you employ so many people it gives power on its own

In terms of the EU, there's no real collective agreement on this thought, its not like the EU is comming to beg us for aid and that isn't really the key issue either (since the EU can print itself out of trouble if they want, the problem is that the better off places doesn't actually need it.) we're not about to budge into other people's problem espeically when no one's asking us to do it.

Yes on a general level pretty much all the East Asian countries here are looking to go more into free trade and thus expand our economies further, so far Korea's basically a step ahead of everyone else for better or worse. the Koreans have a reputation of being rather extreme folks. their economy reflect that to a degree as well as they were the onces most devastated by the 97 financial crisis but have also bounced back extremely strong since. I'm generallly luk warm of their method of proping up big private busniess using state tools, and think it'll eventually backfire down the road. though how far down is questioanble.

Out of the East Asian countries Singapore and us here in Taiwan have the least state / busniess establishment tieup, where as China / Korea / Japan are all pretty deeply entrenched (though in rather different methods) Japan is already getting burned pretty badly by such connections, the problem of such connections in China is pretty obvious but different in nature, while Korea seem to have been shown the downside of this in 97 but remain in the same situation to much extend, where companies like Samsung seems well above the law in Korea. and have unreasonablly high political leverage.

Most of Taiwan's company are smaller and those that are huge tend to have their operation centered outside of Taiwan (such as Foxconn, HTC, ACER, ASUS etc) so it's helpful in the sense that our policy isn't as clearly driven by cooperate interest . though in reality Taiwan has not performed well relatively speaking in the last 2 decade in terms of economic growth.