The Japanese government wants to raise sales taxes twice before 2015, doubling rates from 5 percent today to 10 percent, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The Journal reports that Japanese officials are short half the dollars they want to spend this year. Doubling the sales tax isn’t even enough to close the gap.
The Happiness Realization Party and the Tokyo Tea Party – an American import – oppose the tax.
If Connecticut and many other states don’t get their finances in order, in the future we will be left with similarly difficult decisions.
Each Friday, Raising Hale will highlight one crazy thing from the latest headlines that could happen in Connecticut. To suggest a topic, contact Zach.
It could happen here – Archive:
It probably will happen here… deficits looming and crumbling infrastructure are budding justifications for “revenue enhancement” measures of a mind set currently within government that is either incapable or unwilling to consider that the answer to all manner of societal problems is not necessarily rooted in an expanding bureaucracy. Nationally we await the other shoe to drop on Obamacare which was sold to the public as deficit reducing… which is breathtaking in its lack of logic and in Connecticut the campaign against the private non union sector and small business continues as the baseline for union salary negotiations, the state minimum wage will almost certainly be increased- justified by pantomime concern for the children of the poorest families when it’s almost a certainty that the increase will result in fewer lower wage jobs being created in the first place, exacerbating the real jobless rate and increasing the need to be beholding to creditors, like the US government to kick in additional bucks to cover things benefits- borrowed money that will cost us more, thanks to the downgrade in the state’s credit rating… so clearly we need more money… let’s take another trip to the gubernatorial ATM, better known as DRS and loot from tomorrow’s economic recovery because the recovery doesn’t count for anything unless the unions, who helped install King Malloy, are the principle beneficiaries of said recovery.