People feel more insecure about living conditions than ever -- Akahata editorial, September 7In no time in the past has people's concern about their livelihood been as deep as today a result of Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro's "structural reform" policy.
In a recent Cabinet Office survey on living conditions, 67.2 percent of the respondents, the highest ever, said they feel insecure and anxious about everyday life.
Fifty percent of the respondents chose "life in old age" as their most "worrying and insecure item." It is 6.3 percentage points higher than in the previous poll in June 2002.
Life plans go bust
In the same survey of 20 years ago, the percentage of people who said they were anxious about their life in old age was about 20 percent. Ten years ago, the rate rose to 30 percent. Sharp increases in people's anxiety about their life in old age in the late 1990s finally exceeded 50 percent in recent years.
This trend is a clear reflection of Liberal Democratic Party governments' consecutive adverse revisions of the social services system, followed and accelerated by the present structural reform policy.
In particular, people's increasing anxiety of recent years stands to reason as the Koizumi Cabinet is imposing a tax increase of over 4 trillion yen (34 billion dollars) through higher medical charges, cuts in pension benefits, and tax increases in spite of the economic recession.
The government has plans to further adversely revise the pension system by cutting benefits and increasing premiums in addition to a plan for a large increase in the consumption tax rate. These plans have been further increasing people's anxiety.
Life in old age is not the only cause of worries for people.
In response to a question about prospects of income and assets in the future, 41.7 percent of the respondents say they feel insecure about the prospects, an increase of 5.2 percent over the previous year. The percentage of people who say they worry about their present income and assets increased by 1.6 percent, to 28. 6 percent. Both figures on present and future income are a mirror of people's unprecedented feelings of insecurity concerning their present and future income.
The insecurity about present and future income, which had remained at 10 to 20 percent in the past surveys, suddenly increased since 1997.
People's concerns about their future income significantly increased at around the same time the unemployment rate rose to an all time high of five percent as large corporations continued their restructuring and smaller firms went bankrupt. The number of people who committed suicide to escape from rampant corporate restructuring, unemployment, or business failures increased by 70 percent in 1998. The number of suicide exceeded 30,000 in the same year.
Since the Hashimoto Cabinet, the LDP-led governments have been encouraging arbitrary corporate restructuring under the cover of "structural reform" through legally cutting the corporate tax for large corporations carrying out personnel cuts.
The Koizumi Cabinet's high-handed policy of speeding up the disposal of bad loans gave impetus to corporate restructuring. Ignoring the unemployment rate rising to five-percent, Prime Minister Koizumi continues to be the cold-hearted cheerleader for corporate restructuring. He says that there's no other alternative and "structural reforms should be carried out even though companies may go out of business as a result of this." In two years since the inauguration of the Koizumi Cabinet, wage workers' income has fallen by about nine trillion yen.
We cannot disregard the fact that growing anxiety about the future is one of the major factors contributing to declines in personal spending. A Bank of Japan survey shows that people are being discouraged from spending money because they are anxious about their jobs, incomes, social services, and other factors that will increase their hardships.
Drastic change needed
No matter how hard they work, workers may be dismissed by restructuring companies. Pensions are disappearing like a mirage. With a double-digit consumption tax rate, what will become of their household economy in the future?
It is necessary to reject LDP-driven politics and the "structural reform" policy that sink people's livelihoods and the national economy deep into a seemingly bottomless pit. The government reduced taxes by 1.8 trillion yen for large corporations and wealthy people and gave away two trillion yen to major banks, but imposed a 4-trillion yen burden on the general public. Such an upside-down budget policy should be stopped.
What is needed now is to put an end to repeated setback in social security and continued corporate restructuring and instead switch to a policy in which people's living conditions can get priority over anything else. (end)