Dogmatix

That is the smell of corruption.

It will be interesting to see, if vendors of canes for child discipline will disappear from Shopee. I don't it.

Because it was banned in the early 90s.

Should be on a reciprocal basis like in South Korea and Turkey . If your country allows Thais to own property, you can own property in Thailand. That would still rule out the Chinese and the Ruskies.

How are the Venezuelan chicas there?

Prachai Leophairat, CEO of TPI Polene Public Company Limited was the biggest non-performing debtor in the Tom Yam Kung crisis because the baht declined so much that he couldn't service the foreign currency debt he had foolishly taken on. Now he is whining about a rising baht.

Interestingly, motorcycle hire-purchase loans have bucked the trend, with their NPL ratio dropping from 4.08% to 3.61%, thanks to increased write-offs leading to a lower loan loss provision ratio. Didn't buck the trend. They were actually much worse than the trend, forcing the lenders to make greater write-offs. Numb skulled writer or AI.

People put out this kind of nonsense all the time but, if not supported by any legislation, it is not true.

My father used to say he was beaten a lot at home and at school and it never did him any harm. I would argue with that, as it seemed to turn him into a vicious fagellator who enjoyed making his own weapons out of thick electrical cable, lovingly looping the cable into a handle with cord wrapped around for maximum grip. I refused to cry or show any pain under vicious beatings with these implements, no matter how much it hurt. It was a point of pride for me to keep my dignity and not give him the satisfaction of knowing he had hurt me. This made him more angry, so he would beat me harder. At that point, I had trained myself to switch off like I wasn't there which numbed the pain and made it seem like it was someone else being beaten, until my mother or siblings pleaded with him to stop. At my first boarding school the headmaster was an extreme sexual pervert who loved caning little boys, particularly through thin pajamas or on bare bottoms, his absolute favorite. Boys would return from his study with blood trickling down the legs of their short trousers and scabs and bruises on their bottoms and thighs that lasted for weeks. Corporal punishment was not reserved for serious offences only but was meted out for things like running in the corridors, failing tests etc. Boys who were disliked by certain teachers were often framed for something they hadn't done and sent to the headmaster for a flogging. Teary protestations of innocence just earned the victims additional strokes for "telling tales". At my senior school things went from bad to worse, as prefects were allowed to cane in addition to housemasters and the headmaster. Prefects caned boys for offences such as not calling them sir or being late out of house to breakfast three times in a week. There were also house beatings where a boy had his head pushed out of a dormitory window with the dormer window held down on his shoulders by a prefect, so he couldn't move. Then each house prefect, and there could be 15 of them, took a stroke after a run up. One well built boy wasn't having this and struggled free from the window when the head of house was doing his run up and turned round with a cut throat razor in his hand. The head of house, not so brave on the receiving end of violence, squealed like a pig when he was slashed and the whole bunch of prefects were needed to disarm the boy. The boy was expelled that night and news went around the school dining hall at breakfast like wild fire. The boys were jubilant that someone had stood up to the system and most were sorry the head of house, who was widely disliked, had not received more severe injuries or even been killed. The cheering and thumping on the table that spread around the dining hall was very loud and the headmaster, who couldn't control the situation looked scared and fled the room, as if he thought he might be hanged from a cross beam by the mob. The headmaster who succeeded him was an alcoholic who had to be fired by the board of governors because there were too many reports of bare bottom beatings, often of the wrong culprit and sometimes with fiddling of the boy's naughty bits which the headmaster overtly offered as a lighter alternative to a full on trousers down flogging that drew copious amounts of blood. That school is still paying damages to boys that were abused in the 1970s and recently paid a 400,000 sterling settlement with more cases pending in the Scottish courts. In addition to the flagellation there was wide spread sexual abuse of younger boys by teachers and prefects and at least one documented homosexual rape of a boy by a teacher who lured him into his classroom under some pretext and locked the door. That is my personal experience of corporal punishment at home and school. It is clear that flogging can easily develop into a sexual vice. It is a complete lie to say it never did anyone any harm and those who push this line are complicit in child abuse. I refuse to hit my son.

You say you were a customs officer but you talk as if you were a medical man and social worker combined, not merely someone who applies whatever tariffs and import prohibitions happen to be applied by the government.

Absolutely no justification for the state to insert itself into the transactions or for the Finance Ministry to get involved. Just amend the Land Code to allow the maximum lease to be 99 years. Then the land reverts to the original owner or heirs However, without more detailed leasing law, this will still not work very well. Lessees need the right to transfer the lease to buyers or leave it heirs which is not automatically possible without the freeholder's consent. Since a Thai lease is just a legal agreement between two parties, it is not binding on anyone else, including new owners of the freehold. That should be tidied up. 99 year leases are also of interest to Thais for land that the owners want to keep permanently in the estate but this obviously will not help them,

" Mrs. Kiatkanok expressed her distress, stating that she could no longer manage the aggressive dog and wished to hand it over to an animal protection group." Jeez. She has just caused an innocent person an excruciating death and she wants someone to take care of her lovely mutt. A bullet n the head for both would be more appropriate. In countries with rule of law euthanasia would be mandatory.

The UK should legalise too and put an end to this type of crime.

This sounds Anutin’s bill that passed its first reading in early 2023 but was shot down by the Democrats in the second reading because they were upset that Anutin had been sending people to campaign aggressively in the South which used to be the Dems’ stronghold.

These are really serious crimes.

The RD has to coordinate with the police to come up with rules linking visas to tax returns. This takes some time but it will probably happen eventually as it is a no brainer for them. It has been in place for years for NON-O visas linked to work permits. So it should not be hard. There is already existing but dormant regulation requiring tax clearance certificates for foreigners to leave the country. The police just have to issue an internal order to enforce this once again, if they feel like it. We used to have to send a messenger to the RD to get this certificate to show that all tax was paid up-to-date.

The big problem with DTAs in all of this is that what is written in them is just a bare bones guideline for how countries tax overseas income of residents. European countries have had global taxation and applied their DTAs to it for many years in respect of the millions of European expats living in other European countries. Generally the DTAs say that most types of income may be taxed in either the country of the taxpayer's residence or in the country where the income arises. The European tax authorities are staffed by grown ups and have worked out practical gentlemen's agreements over the years on how to apply these treaties. Mostly they have applied the principle that, if income has been subjected to tax in the country it arose, the country of taxpayer residence will not attempt to tax it again and collect the difference, if their rate is higher. This principle is often still respected in cases where the income was subject to tax in the country it arose but not taxed. On the basis of swings and round abouts these tax authorities save a lot of trouble for themselves and taxpayers and probably don't lose any revenue. The Thai RD, on the other hand, is not staffed by grown ups who have any experience of the practical application of DTAs. What little they have said about how they plan to apply just the remittance tax has been largely incoherent and contradictory but one point comes through clearly. That is that they plan to collect every last satang they can based on the exact letter of the DTAs. So that in all cases where the treaties say they may tax income income, they will, even if the income is already subject to tax in its country of origin. This will create huge problems for taxpayers and for the generally ignorant, poorly trained and monoglot RD staff in order to collect very little incremental tax. If they were sensible they would just focus on overseas income that is not subject to tax and there is plenty of it, including capital gains on shares traded in offshore markets which are generally not subject to tax for non-residents.

If they legislate to collect global tax, it is as sure as God made little green apples that will link tax compliance with visa renewal within a year or two of the change. If they stick with the recently introduced remittance tax, it is also very likely. Expats should plan accordingly.

That's why they want the windfall of adding a couple of hundred thousand foreigners to the payroll. Could add 2% more taxpayers.

I wonder what happens to Brits who fraudulently claim the index linked UK state pension and winter fuel allowance (if that survives under Stammer), using a correspondence address in the UK while living in the Thai sunshine. Will they claim tax credits from HMRC to show the RD?

The US air bases in Thailand were needed for the carpet bombing of Indochina but the US has no current need for anything in Thailand. Fake news.

Many mongers may move to meet younger women in the Philippines to avoid all this hassle and expense.

One thing I think they will not touch to protect wealthy politician with money from corruption offshore like one particularly famous and currently powerful family is offshore companies. In the UK any offshore company with UK resident directors or have over a certain percentage of UK resident shareholders or that uses a UK address or holds meetings there is considered a UK company and liable to UK corporation tax. Thailand considers offshore companies to be Thai, only if they appear to be conducting business from Thailand. It doesn't matter if all the shareholders and directors are Thai residents. So wealthy Thais can own their offshore assets through offshore companies and pay not tax on interest, dividends and capital gains in the company The can also remit money to Thailand as corporate loans. The only taxable event would be if a Thai resident shareholder receives a dividend or a salary from the company. If they do eventually follow the UK and other farang countries in this, the super wealthy will still be able to add overseas nominees and other layers of concealment.

That's right in the case of US SS pensions and pensions from US government, state or local government employment because the US has the sole right to tax this income in the DTA. I am know about 401K. If no specifically exempted in the DTA, it would be taxable in Thailand. Unfortunately very few other farang countries negotiated to exempt state pensions in their DTAs like the US did. You will find that nearly all exempt only pensions from government employment. However, it is arguable whether foreign state pensions are taxable because the wording in Section 40 covering pensions specifies only pensions from employment. It doesn't specify pensions that are not from employment. Perhaps they will argue that the UK state pension is indirectly from employment because yhou don't get it, if you haven't worked. But other pensions like the Australian Superannuation cannot be regarded as pension from employment because it is now payable to slackers who have never worked a day in their lives. I wonder, if they will amend the wording to cover all foreign pensions but I doubt it as they are very lazy thinkers and probably haven't got round to this year.

Would be nice, if they mentioned what year they hope this will take effect and whether the Ung Ing government supports it, since it has to go through parliament. Last year's gift was announced in September and took effect from 1 Jan but that was just the RD chief making a short announcement that the relevant clause in the RD no longer meant what it clearly said. This time it has to go to the Council of State for vetting and pass 3 readings in parliament, unless the government claims it is an emergency, in which case it can be enacted through a Royal Decree, bypassing parliament. Since it is a fairly radical change, my guess is that it would go through parliament but you never know in this country.