MIKIO KISARA（木皿幹雄）, the author, pointed out the fundamental errors underlying the economic policies of the time.
He questioned the increases in the consumption tax and the reductions in the corporate tax, and called for a shift toward policies that would enrich the people and encourage consumption.
This essay, originally published on August 5, 2010, which questions whether bureaucrats are fulfilling their mission as public servants, is republished here.

The Thinking Is Wrong…It Is the Other Way Around.
August 5, 2010
What is wrong with increasing the consumption tax is that its underlying idea is to take from the people.
Twenty years ago, the GDP of the United States was 750 trillion yen; now it is 1,300 trillion yen.
Japan’s GDP was 550 trillion yen; now it is 460 trillion yen.
The policy is doomed because it reflects the thinking of elites who belonged to the 10 percent of the population who had no need to worry about their livelihoods even during these twenty years of prolonged stagnation.
The 90 percent of working people who have cut back and cut back again for twenty years…including 11.6 million people earning no more than two million yen a year…and the many young people who, even at the age of thirty, have no stable employment and cannot marry…will respond to a consumption tax increase by becoming defensive.
The elites do not understand that these people will cut back even further.
They do not understand that deflation will deepen further.
Care services and similar measures alone cannot halt or rescue this prolonged stagnation of what was the world’s second-largest economic superpower.
I believe this carries nothing but the danger of bringing the country to its death, just as the super-heavy taxation imposed more than twenty years ago did.
This is what I mean when I say that democracy has neither been completed nor taken root in Japan.
Despite the tremendous catastrophe it caused, and despite the passage of sixty years since the war, it fails because Japan still cannot free itself from the mentality of obeying those in authority.
It fails because bureaucrats and government officials have no conception whatsoever that, as public servants, they are supposed to serve the people.
When Philadelphia and Baltimore in the United States fell into severe stagnation and population decline because of changes in industrial structure, they brought together the wisdom of the public and private sectors and gave.
They adopted preferential tax measures to attract people and businesses.
It is not about taking.
They must not take.
They must give.
They must enrich the people.
Enrich them and lead them toward consumption…Do you think a country can regain its vitality when people are unable to buy what they want, work for their entire lives, and die with five million yen?
Make every kind of dividend completely tax-free—provided that receipts are submitted as proof that the money was spent on consumption, and provided that laws impose severe punishment on anyone who falsifies those receipts—and direct that money toward consumption.
Giving is necessary.
If they return to their true role as public servants, they should understand this.
Reductions in the corporate tax, in fact, cannot make up for the failures of policy over the past twenty years.
This is because, under present conditions, only the negative effect of the double-edged sword of reducing tax revenue will emerge.
Today’s large corporations, ensnared by the greedy and cunning form of twentieth-century capitalism, will almost certainly not raise workers’ wages simply because the corporate tax rate has been lowered.
Although they ordinarily show contempt for stocks, at a time like this they will undoubtedly become conscious of the stock market.
In other words, reductions in the corporate tax will not lead to consumption—their effect in expanding domestic demand will be virtually zero.
Everyone will merely end up strangling one another.
The corporate tax reduction is equivalent to the land value tax of twenty years ago.
Its existence is not a major problem…it is by no means the kind of problem without which businesses would be unable to survive…it does not solve the real problem that exists here and now.
The complete inability to expect anything from domestic demand—that is the problem Japanese companies have faced for the past twenty years.
If one begins from the idea of enriching the people…if one is a noble public servant—a true elite—the answer should be simple.
The Liberal Democratic Party’s politics of pursuing its own interests came to an end long ago.
There is no returning to it now.
To the bureaucrats who are also my former classmates and seniors.
The old god died long ago.
It came to an end long ago.
And it did so amid an unprecedented tragedy.
If, even sixty years after the war, you remain bound by that old god, you have no qualification to call yourselves elites, and future generations will record only that, before the war and now alike, you merely destroyed the country—if things continue as they are.
In the twenty-first century, the only people still living alongside the old god, the only people still running a centralized state, are the mass media and you.
I believe that what is now being tested is whether the bureaucratic elite, more than half of whom are University of Tokyo graduates with so much pride that they look down their noses even at Waseda, are truly the elites capable of saving the country.
After all, those from Waseda merely follow their lead.