Saturday, June 26, 2010

Call Me Unreliable

Dear MTC,

Exactly how, if we are to go by your projected vote results, is the Komeito going to win four district seats when the party is only fielding three district candidates?

Uhhh...electoral magic?

For a text a little less magical, please check out my expanded piece on Kan and the consumption tax picked up by the very kind folks at PanOrient News, a fledgling English/Japanese/Arabic news service.

Sincerely,

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was there the other day playing around and a. found your op-ed piece, and b. found that google translate does a pretty damn good job of making Arabic readable (unlike Korean, Chinese and Japanese). ちなみに。。

Jan Moren said...

Perhaps Soka Gakkai and kofuku no kagaku will merge, giving them the extra candidates they need?

Could happen.

Anonymous said...

MTC wrote, "In the July 2007 House of Councillors elections, the electorate delivered the LDP a sound thrashing, and Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto was forced to resign."

I thought Hashimoto died in 2006.

By the way, you know what happens when companies tighten their belts during a recession and the government follows suit? A much deeper recession; which makes this Kan idea very bad at this junction. You made the point earlier in the op-ed about the drastic cut in spending following the tax hike 15 years ago. The time to raise the consumption tax was around the end of the Koizumi administration when business was good. Governments tighten their belts when everyone else is spending not when everyone else tightens their belts.

MTC said...

Anonymous -

Oh great! Now I can reanimate the dead.

The election in question was of course the July 1998 elections.