  Defend public assistance for needy households -- Akahata editorial, December 29 (Excerpts)Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro's cabinet is attempting to apply his "structural reform" policy of cutting social services to even the public assistance system for needy families, the last resort for impoverished people. In the draft budget for FY 2005, an additional public benefit to a needy single-parent family with children between age 16 and 18 will be eliminated, and the whole program will be phased out in three years. This will follow the phased abolition of the additional benefit program for needy elderly people. In fact, about 80 percent of single-parent families experience difficult living conditions. The additional payment must not be abolished. The need is to improve the whole system so that the level of living conditions of single-parent families rises from the present low level. Many welfare offices are illegally forcing recipient mothers and the sick to work to earn their living regardless of their difficulty to work, and stopping payments and rejecting new applications. The ruling Liberal Democratic and Komei parties and the government have agreed to lower the government share in the livelihood protection costs to be effective from FY 2007. During the past year, the expert committee discussed ways to make the livelihood protection system "accessible and helpful for self-support." This is because the committee had to admit that the system has become dysfunctional as is typically seen in a large number of low income people who are still outside the benefit of the system. The government must examine the serious difficulty facing them and improve the system based on reality and the expert committee's conclusion. It is time to develop a popular movement to stop the Koizumi Cabinet's plan to worsen the livelihood protection system in contravention of the idea of Article 25 of the Constitution and call for a better system as a guarantee for the people's right to live. (end) |