Transcript of the above video:

As the title of this video suggests, we are discussing Work Permits. There has been a lot of talk recently as of the time of this video at least, regarding authorities here in Thailand have approved at least in principle, a statement from the Cabinet that they are going to be bringing on some new Visa categories essentially designed to attract wealthy expats, wealthy tourists for lack of a better term, wealthy individuals to come to Thailand and spend time here, live here presumably. 

A recent article from the Bangkok Post print edition, Wednesday September 15th, 2021, the article is titled: Govt to entice rich expats. Quoting directly: "The package also includes automatic Work Permits, the same rates of income tax as Thai citizens, tax exemption for income earned abroad and ownership of properties and land he said." We have done other videos contemporaneously with this one where we discuss the land issue, some tax stuff associated with this but this notion of "automatic Thai Work Permits", or "automatic Work Permits", I don't think that is well put and this may seem semantic but I would say it is better put "automatic work authorization". 

It appears to me that this whole program is being brought online in a similar manner to the so-called Smart Visa which we have seen and discussed in the past. Basically the Smart Visa was being brought online to streamline work authorization in the digital economy for digital nomads and for high tech industries. They seem to be grafting that same framework on to this program if you will, this initiative to attract wealthy folks. What it looks like to me, and we have done other videos where we discuss this, there is a lot of high monetary thresholds associated with getting one of these new kinds of visas. So in a sense they kind of just throw the work authorization in; that is the way I am looking at it. Some of them require $250,000 investment into Thailand, this is substantial monetary requirements to get into the program. So the way I would look at it, it is not like an automatic Work Permit, it is more built in work authorization similar to the Smart Visa program.