Opposition proposes cash handouts, vaccine priority for teachers

cash handouts? where are they going to get this money? ahh yes from their behinds... this country is deep into debt and what they really need is to get businesses back up (creating jobs) so everyone can pay taxes!

You see? I mean YOU who always call for anyone, anything but LDP.

No. Absolutely not enough to take it over. While the 1st opposition party is this LOW level, how could you possibly expect Japan to change?

Talk and officially issue much more drastic manifesto regardless the voters know those are empty promises anyway, if you are the biggest opposition. All you have been doing is to monitor SNS and flattering all the time.

No wonder　Japan has been ridiculed as if no different from the single political party's　dictatorship.

Do not Flatter. Show what direction Japan is to be headed. Otherwise, you never ever able to move the mountain ( as per what Takako Doi had once expressed)

Japan really should change constitution and any required laws to completely alter current political system

and kick all those inept, so-called professional politicians out of the scene.

People who call this "vote buying" should remember that political parties exist more or less as what you might call "transmission belts" for the interests of their supporters. It should not surprise anyone that a party will do something that benefits the interests of those who support it - the question you should be asking yourselves is if this thing you call "vote buying" is the right thing, if this "vote buying" is something that makes our society a better place.

Of course, one should also be weary of empty promises, and we see those a lot - but that is in part because Japanese people too often just take things lying down instead of punishing bad politicians for their (lack of) actions.

In any case, I do think these policies would be the right thing to do, regardless of whether or not you want to call it "vote buying"; any policy that benefits anyone can be construed that way.

Why am i not surprise the opposition resort to this old tactic to get votes

Not just the opposition. Komeito does this sort of BS all the time too, and the LDP is complicit.

I don’t recall hearing the Isshin party ever demand that we spray money around willy nilly though, but I probably just missed their call too.

@Kokegawa

So true. but not surprising, considering there is one very large country with a total dysfunctional health sector, where many believe that being bankrupted by calling an ambulance or buying a month's worth of insulin supplies means 'freedumb', and that a healthcare system funded by taxes is (drum roll, menacing music ...) SOCIALISM! They think that just invoking the word 'socialism' is enough to send the other person running for the hills. So imagine a party that actually has 'Communism' in the name - it just blows all the circuits in their brains. So to actually study a policy which a particular alliance are putting forward is way beyond them. They also assume everyone else will instinctively share their phobia.

And by the way, these are policies which would be considered completely normal and every day in social democratic governments all over Europe.

The fact the the alliance are putting forward these straightforward and sensible immediate measures to tackle the current chaos is down to the fact that the LDP has been virtually sitting on its hands for the last year and a half.

Considering and then really forming a platform with the communists alone disqualified that whole block already. The rest is just only cosmetics. You can’t bring the country on course for all the future challenges with a childish manifest of a small insufficient cash handout or vaccination priorities for a small group of the population that even contradicts their otherwise always equality ideologies

"Always equality ideologies" is such a terrible and ignorant perspective on communism. It's like something any child can come up with. I will always recommend people read more, because it would lead to less of this confusion. Let's take a look at the classics:

"But one man is superior to another physically, or mentally, and supplies more labor in the same time, or can labor for a longer time; and labor, to serve as a measure, must be defined by its duration or intensity, otherwise it ceases to be a standard of measurement. This equal right is an unequal right for unequal labor. It recognizes no class differences, because everyone is only a worker like everyone else; but it tacitly recognizes unequal individual endowment, and thus productive capacity, as a natural privilege. It is, therefore, a right of inequality, in its content, like every right. Right, by its very nature, can consist only in the application of an equal standard; but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored. Further, one worker is married, another is not; one has more children than another, and so on and so forth. Thus, with an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. To avoid all these defects, right, instead of being equal, would have to be unequal."

Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875).

"[The] real content of the proletarian demand for equality is the demand for the abolition of classes. Any demand for equality which goes beyond that, of necessity passes into absurdity... The idea of equality, both in its bourgeois and in its proletarian form, is therefore itself a historical product, the creation of which required definite historical conditions that in turn themselves presuppose a long previous history. It is therefore anything but an eternal truth."

Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring (1877)

Giving vaccine priority to those who may well need it most "contradicts" nothing of the ideological content that the JCP claims to have. And these are just emergency policy proposals and whatever the parties could agree on, not their entire platform.

Because the people can see through it as a cheap tactic to gain votes.

Instead of the tried and true LDP tactic of ignoring the voters and zealously seeking to address the needs of their cronies exclusively?

So their platform is to do all the stuff Japanese people want...

...which means they will probably lose in the election.

Because the people can see through it as a cheap tactic to gain votes.

Offering cash handouts. Why am i not surprise the opposition resort to this old tactic to get votes

vaccine priority for teachers

What a quick response and great thinking from opposition. Dyaaum!

Just fyi, but the 100,000 per person to low-income households was already suggested early this summer by Shimomura, a high-up in the LDP. Given the source, this was taken by the press to be 1. likely and 2. used as a vote-winner in this autumn's election.

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20210706/k10013121461000.html

If the opposition are also publicly pushing for it, that will also make it more likely. Judging from comments on Yahoo's story yesterday, the main obstacle may be resentment from people who do not qualify as low income. Low income probably means below the income tax threshold, and there are millions who pay income tax but still have difficulty making ends meet due to Covid.

Spot on. If that becomes the case, it make become attractive for Japan's legion of part timers, many making in the 160,000 to 300,000 range, and paying 60,000 to 80,000 yen in taxes at the end of the month, to fall below that threshold.

I always thought such a system of taxation is pretty regressive and burdensome for low-income earners.

Many of them have had working hours cut due to the pandemic anyway.

So people who barely pay taxes gets all the benefits again??? income caps to benefits are dumb. And a lot of those “low” income households are people doing cash only jobs and simply not reporting to gov.

Just fyi, but the 100,000 per person to low-income households was already suggested early this summer by Shimomura, a high-up in the LDP. Given the source, this was taken by the press to be 1. likely and 2. used as a vote-winner in this autumn's election.

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20210706/k10013121461000.html

If the opposition are also publicly pushing for it, that will also make it more likely. Judging from comments on Yahoo's story yesterday, the main obstacle may be resentment from people who do not qualify as low income. Low income probably means below the income tax threshold, and there are millions who pay income tax but still have difficulty making ends meet due to Covid.

Considering and then really forming a platform with the communists alone disqualified that whole block already. The rest is just only cosmetics. You can’t bring the country on course for all the future challenges with a childish manifest of a small insufficient cash handout or vaccination priorities for a small group of the population that even contradicts their otherwise always equality ideologies.

Brilliant ,so that should be a vote getter

Earlier this week, the CDPJ, the Japanese Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party and Reiwa Shinsengumi agreed on a set of joint pledges, including lowering the consumption tax rate and achieving a zero-carbon society without nuclear energy.

They also have a UBI proposal. LDP rank and file: But where are the no-bid contracts for Dentsu and corporate subsidies? Subsidies for farmers so they can promote 1000 dollar melons?

What a poor set of proposals.

Shots for teachers? They have already been offered priority a long time ago. Besides essential workers, medical staff, and the elderly, it was teachers next.

And ¥100,000 to low income families? Like, thats Abe’s thing, he already did that, and passing out cash shouldn’t really qualify as “an idea” if the whole western world is doing it.

The rest look like pledges that these politicians love to print on colored paper and wrap around themselves and things while fist pumping gambare.

Giving vaccine priority to teachers is already a practice used by many prefectures/towns...

Why? Aren't bars and restaurants "more important?" Talk is cheap Japan.

@divinda. Fully evident by the Olympic fiasco!

@divinda So funny so true, there is an alternative but that's unimaginable for most voters.

Maybe they will also stop the suicides and awful crimes that have come to the fore recently?

All Show No Go.

Earlier this week, the CDPJ, the Japanese Communist Party, the Social Democratic Party and Reiwa Shinsengumi agreed on a set of joint pledges, including lowering the consumption tax rate and achieving a zero-carbon society without nuclear energy.

They also vowed to raise the minimum wage, oppose amending the Constitution and giving couples the option of keeping separate surnames after marriage.

So their platform is to do all the stuff Japanese people want...

...which means they will probably lose in the election.