- 03 Aug 2018 20:07
#14936899
Sure. Just to jolt people awake.
I saw some weird $#!+ living there, things that seemed clearly malevolent rather than just incompetent. Like the "education" system.
The sales tax is just one piece of a much larger puzzle.
Living in Japan I got used to the unstated being the important part. Maybe I'm hypersensitive, but that's how it looks, or at least could look.
The idea is that when you're working, you can survive, but the prospect of retirement looks horrible.
Consumption does not drive the Japanese economy. Exports do.
I agree they want to reduce the elderly population, and minimal provision for them is one part of that. However, it's true they haven't taken measures I would consider much more effective and obvious. For example, there are now about 250K elderly, incapacitated Japanese kept alive in hospitals and other institutions by tube feeding. 250K! That's 1/500 of the entire population! But they don't seem able to find a way to do anything about it.
Not if you think workers will not be able to compete with robots, and consumers will just be in the way.
Don't know me very well, do you?
Victoribus Spolia wrote:As much as I agree with most of what you said in both of your posts on here, isn't this bit a little hyperbolic and speculative?
Sure. Just to jolt people awake.
I mean, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and the idea that the wealthy are trying to create conditions in Japan that even the mid-victorians would envy seems a bit far-fetched.
I saw some weird $#!+ living there, things that seemed clearly malevolent rather than just incompetent. Like the "education" system.
I mean, is an 8% sales tax really going to cause mass suicide due to extreme poverty? That seems a bit nutty to me.
The sales tax is just one piece of a much larger puzzle.
If you are going to claim that the elites are raising consumer taxes to create mass suicide to ameliorate their social-security costs, you need at least some evidence for this as a motive.
Living in Japan I got used to the unstated being the important part. Maybe I'm hypersensitive, but that's how it looks, or at least could look.
Plus its a shitty plan if you think about, even if you kill off 10% of the working population by tax-induced suicide (which everyone would notice BTW), the other 90% is still going to retire anyway and now you have even less workers paying taxes into the retirement subsidy pool because they killed themselves and therefore aren't paying any consumer taxes into the system.
The idea is that when you're working, you can survive, but the prospect of retirement looks horrible.
Plus, as any marketing advertiser would tell you, the most important consumers are the young working ones, they buy the most and are the ones that drive the economy....they are exactly the ones you don't want to kill.
Consumption does not drive the Japanese economy. Exports do.
If these elites wanted to cull their population, they would kill the ones already retired and leaching off of the subsidies, not the ones paying for those subsidies.
I agree they want to reduce the elderly population, and minimal provision for them is one part of that. However, it's true they haven't taken measures I would consider much more effective and obvious. For example, there are now about 250K elderly, incapacitated Japanese kept alive in hospitals and other institutions by tube feeding. 250K! That's 1/500 of the entire population! But they don't seem able to find a way to do anything about it.
Besides, the birth rate is so low in Japan its population is already shrinking at an exponential rate, so reducing it further would be somewhat superfluous.
Not if you think workers will not be able to compete with robots, and consumers will just be in the way.
In a simple paragraph, I don't want to read 400 lines responding to my dozen above. If you could please.
Don't know me very well, do you?