Four years ago, in a weak moment, I wrote a tongue-firmly-planted-in-cheek set of "rules for understanding news from Japan" for my amusement and I hoped the amusement of others. Since the time of their composition, some of the rules have become rather dated. On the whole, however, they have held up rather well.
This was Rule #6:
If a Democratic Party member claims something is true on television, it is probably not true. When it is true, it was political suicide for him to have said it.So two cheers for Prime Minister Kan Naoto and his egregious introduction of the concept of a rise in the consumption tax based on a misreading of Japan as ressembling Greece and the charged atmospheres inside the Ministry of Finance and at the G20 summit. By introducing discussion of a hike in taxes three weeks before a national election, he has given himself and the Democratic Party of Japan a just-so story for why the party finished with so many fewer seats than expected in the House of Councillors on July 11. Just run the counter-factual: imagine the chaos inside the party right now if Kan had not talked about the consumption tax and they had suffered the same dispiriting defeat.
To the benefit of the Prime Minister and the party, they have now a "lesson" that they have "learned" -- and will no longer appear irresponsible if they shelve all ideas about a hike in the consumption tax until after mid-2013.
"Whew," the party members can now say, "We are off the hook on that horrible, unpopular, regressive, contractionary, deflationary pseudo-solution to Japan's fiscal and economic growth problems which the bureaucrats of the Ministry of Finance and their acolytes throw out like a spanner into the works of any reasonable discussion of Japan's economic future!"
Photo credit: MTC