August 21, 2010
Prime Minister Kan…Twenty years ago, GDP stood at 750 trillion yen in the United States and 550 trillion yen in Japan; now, it stands at 1,300 trillion yen in the United States and around 470 trillion yen in Japan…The total increase in government bonds over these twenty years amounts to approximately 450 trillion yen.
By now, you should understand particularly well that it was, in substance, the bureaucrats who created this situation and shaped these past twenty years.
Most Liberal Democratic Party politicians knew that the bureaucrats were more capable than they were, and the bureaucrats knew it too.
So, in practice, they left everything to the bureaucrats…while never neglecting to channel benefits to their own constituencies…And the bureaucrats, for their part, never neglected to secure positions for themselves after retirement through amakudari.
When I put together the analyses of the so-called beat reporters and political insiders concerning the policies that you and your supporters intend to implement…apart from the government program reviews…it appears to me that you intend to depend on the bureaucrats in the same way and conduct politics with the same mindset as theirs, but can that return Japan to the path of prosperity?
Can you raise stock prices that have not risen by even a single yen for a quarter of a century?
Can you turn the GDP of 550 trillion yen from twenty years ago into 1,000 trillion yen twenty years from now?
The Wall Street Journal stated that, “While China today has become a country of underlying strength and self-confidence, Japan’s twenty years of stagnation are a tragedy both for the world and for the Japanese people.”
That is the absolute truth.
Are you truly confident that you will not deepen this tragedy…that you will not lead Japan down the path of decline?