* In a recent piece at GlobalSecurity.org (via Voice of America), the foreign and military affairs website, Japan has just issued a 720bn yen debt waiver to Iraq for past debt, and remains upbeat about leaving troops at the same time. Really, how generous.
* The very same day, Japanese lawmakers were trying to pass a bill to remove a substantial chunk of tax relief starting 2007, leading to a real increase of everyman's tax burden of 3.3trn yen: ANNUALLY. Now that's a lot of money. There is no starker example of how the taxation that was brought in to save us from the hole in the pension fund system, rural regeneration projects and other employment schemes outside pork barrel politics, are channeled straight back into another country's war effort.
* You do the math. 720bn/3300bn=21.8% of the tax raise for year 1 goes straight from the Japanese taxpayer (my money) into the coffers of the Iraq puppet regime (Halliburton/Chevron money). I guess that's why Prime Minister Koizumi was quoted saying in the same Nikkei article and to reporters that "it is important that we get people to understand that it is kinda important to pull this taxation through". Ah huh, kinda important for you maybe, but not with my money. Politically: another swindle of the people, all for the glory of white people blowing up brown people (again). Economically: we have come full circle and risk the Hashimoto dilemma (ex-prime minister in mid-1990s) -- who increased the consumption tax and plunged the country into ten years of stagnation just as the country was recovering from the end of the economic bubble downturn. A Hashimoto II in the making?
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