An essay criticizing Japan’s consumption tax hike as a political bargain that obstructed deflation recovery. It examines the Democratic Party leadership’s failures after the 2011 disaster, the manipulation of pseudo-moralism, and the massive loss of national wealth that followed.

2016-03-23
On page four of today’s Nikkei newspaper, there is an article related to the entirely reasonable views of Paul Krugman.
To the left of this article is a small boxed headline reading, “Calls to postpone the tax hike from both ruling and opposition parties.”
Within it, Goshi Hosono, the Democratic Party’s policy chief, a man who failed to act when he should have as a politician and yet proved fully capable when it came to extramarital affairs, was saying something so absurd it left one speechless.
He was insisting that resignation was the proper course.
That the consumption tax hike has continued to obstruct the policies of the Shinzo Abe administration—one of the rare genuine governments in recent times attempting to eradicate deflation—is a fact plainly visible to anyone except those of exceptionally low intellect or those whose minds have been warped into that of kindergarten children by reading Asahi and the like.
The Naoto Kan administration of the Democratic Party was one that the vast majority of the Japanese people wanted to see resign immediately.
Yet he exploited the Great East Japan Earthquake to prolong his hold on power, and through criminally foolish decisions—hardly an exaggeration to call him a traitor—allowed himself to be manipulated by Masayoshi Son and Mizuho Fukushima, resulting in the truly infantile decision to immediately shut down all nuclear power plants.
As already noted, at precisely the same time, South Korea and China decided to newly construct and massively expand their nuclear power generation.
As a result, the evil that inhabits this world under the name of greed sold crude oil and natural gas to resource-poor Japan at outrageously inflated rates cynically labeled the “Japan premium,” even as the entire world watched the disaster unfold on television.
That alone should be enough to understand the nature of the evil that exists in this world.
This evil exploits pseudo-moralism or takes advantage of it.
I myself, having long subscribed to Asahi Shimbun, became one of these pseudo-moralists, and thus I too fell victim to that evil.
The poisonous influence of Asahi Shimbun has been indiscriminately spread throughout the world.
Because of this, Japan lost 10 billion yen every single day, amounting to several trillion yen of national wealth over just a few years.
Has Hosono forgotten that the man whose obsession with popularity and clinging to power was abnormal pushed through a 10 percent consumption tax hike in the Diet in exchange for his own resignation?
To be continued.