January 29, 2025

Japanese Communist Party Executive Committee Chair Tamura Tomoko, in her interpellation at the House of Representatives plenary session on January 28, criticized the government led by Prime Minister Ishiba Shigeru for its massive arms buildup program and its pork-barrel fiscal policies that benefit large corporations.

Tamura stressed the need for the government to make a shift in all policies, rather than partial improvements, in order to overcome the current hardships related to people’s livelihoods, and proposed five reforms along with ways to secure necessary financial resources: substantial wage hikes; reform of the unfair tax system; a social security system so that all people can feel secure; no burden of school and educational costs on parents; and a stable food supply.

Tamura demanded that a yearly wage-hike target be set at more than 330,000 yen, the amount equivalent to the decrease in yearly wages since the imposition of “Abenomics” and that a mechanism be created to utilize a portion of large corporations’ internal reserves for pay increases. She also demanded that regulations on overtime work be strengthened and that working hours be shortened.

Regarding a tax system, Tamura said that exempting living expenses from taxation should be the principle. She stated that the abolition of the tax-invoice system and consumption tax cuts with a view to eventually abolishing it will be “the measures that will reach people who are most in need”. She pointed out that if the corporate tax rate is returned to a pre-Abenomics level and tax breaks for large corporations and the wealthy are eliminated, 14.6 trillion yen in tax revenues will be collected and thus a reduction in the consumption tax rate to 5% will be feasible.

Tamura demanded an increase in public spending on pensions, medical care, and nursing care, as well as a drastic expansion of the education budget in order to move toward eliminating financial burdens on parents for tuition fees and educational costs. She called for a change in the agricultural policies to ones that will increase incomes for all farm, dairy, and livestock workers with the immediate goal of restoring Japan’s food self-sufficiency rate to 50%.

In order to finance such policies which support people’s daily lives, Tamura said that 40 trillion yen will be generated by taxing large corporations and the wealthy, cancelling the planned major military buildup, and temporarily issuing government bonds. She, however, noted that the government is seeking military spending of 8.7 trillion yen in its budget draft for fiscal 2025, warning that “this would lead to higher taxes on the general public, cutbacks in the budget needed to improve people’s daily lives and a radical increase in the issuance of government bonds.” She said that the JCP will do its utmost to drastically recompile the budget draft.