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Comment by ascar | Hacker News Reader

> nearly 100% total tax burden.

What kind of number is this? The debt to GDP is actually more than 200% and you will find the US also above 100%. So yes Japan has a big debt problem, but what metric are you using?

> Yet it's worse... Japan has a major silver crime issue and well unspoken probable slave labour problem.

Do you have any source for that? I don't know about silver crime, but the globalslaveryindex ranks Japan as literally the lowest country (167/167 [1]), 4 times better than the US and more than 6 times better than a few European countries I looked up like Germany, Austria, France or UK.

> The fix for Japan is so simple yet for 30 years nobody has been willing to do it.

If it's so easy, why don't you at least enlighten us instead of just stating it's easy?

[1] https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/data/country-data/ja...

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>What kind of number is this? The debt to GDP is actually more than 200% and you will find the US also above 100%. So yes Japan has a big debt problem, but what metric are you using?

Governments like to split up taxes and tax different things. Middle east generally has no personal income tax or even a corporate tax. Yet you can't say the middle east has no taxes.

You have to analyze 'total tax burden' but you also can't allow even more tricks like progressive taxes making it apples/oranges.

Japan has one of the highest personal taxes in the world at 55%. You work for the government 6 months of the year.

When you analyze total tax burden properly. There's only a few countries in the world whose taxes are near 100%. Basically Japanese people work for the government the entire year and don't realize it. The government sure doesn't provide everything for them to live.

>Do you have any source for that? I don't know about silver crime,

Something like this: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/20/poverty-ageing-j...

Basically in population declines or situations like world war 2 countries are currently in or soon to be in. Effectively elderly retirees are forced to go back to work. They let their skills expire. They take an ego hit being forced to work a mcjob. So they steal instead. This wasn't even marginally the problem it will be. It's something that's set it stone.

>but the globalslaveryindex ranks Japan as literally the lowest country (167/167 [1]), 4 times better than the US and more than 6 times better than a few European countries I looked up like Germany, Austria, France or UK.

That's literally impossible. Answer me 2 things that will tell me if it's the lowest slavery in the world.

1. What is the criminal conviction rate in Japan?

2. Is there penal labour in Japan?

>If it's so easy, why don't you at least enlighten us instead of just stating it's easy?

Well I touched on it. total tax burden being at 100% means you cant raise taxes.

Balancing the budget is step #1. Figure out all the positive rights that need reducing or cancelling. End abenomics asap. Balanced budget amendment to the constitution.

Massively increase immigration in order to dilute tax cost or debt/capita. Not sure how that'll work but probably also a later disaster for japan. 1 problem at a time.

Probably need to build a free trade zone. Massive increase in tourism needed. Probably will need a massive amount of deregulation that will blow your mind.

Now you have to deal with the consequences of the above options. They aren't good. Probably going to be ~25% unemployment. Probably about 4% poverty. GDP contraction of -5%/year for several years. Depression level disaster to be sure.

Yet this depression is far less painful than Japan's current path.

> total tax burden being at 100% means you cant raise taxes.

You still haven't explained what this means. The Japanese tax to GDP ratio is 31%, below the OECD average

https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/revenue-statistics-japan...

Japan spends 38% of its GDP, about the same as the US does.

To balance the budget the government would thus have to take 38% of GDP. That would put it in the same range as Germany, Norway, Netherlands, and way below Italy, Sweden, Denmark, France,

> When you analyze total tax burden properly. There's only a few countries in the world whose taxes are near 100%.

Define “properly”, paying particular attention to explaining why the standard “revenue/GDP” method is wrong, and show your supporting data for Japan being near 100%.

Here's a nifty sortable table of tax revenue as percentage of GDP:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven...

Japan's is 38.4%. Eyeballing their position in the table suggests they're 66th percentile. (The US is at 38.1%; Germany is Europe's economic powerhouse, and is at 43.9%)

> Japan has one of the highest personal taxes in the world at 55%.

Taxes are progressive in Japan. The highest bracket may be that high, but very few people pay anything anywhere near that. I'm paid quite well here, and my rate isn't anywhere near that, and something you're leaving out is that health insurance is covered in those taxes.

>That's literally impossible. Answer me 2 things that will tell me if it's the lowest slavery in the world.

>1. What is the criminal conviction rate in Japan?

>2. Is there penal labour in Japan?

If I'm reading this argument correctly, it's that because Japan has a high (>99%) conviction rate and uses mandatory penal labour, Japan, therefore, has a modern slavery problem.

There's a few issues with this, the generally accepted consensus for Japan's high conviction rate is that it can be explained almost entirely by the fact that Japan's prosecutors are underemployed and overworked and this is something that can be trivially seen, e.g., while the 42% of US felony arrests result in prosecution the figure in Japan is only 17%, or while the US prosecutes 75% arrested for murder Japan only tries 43%. The implication is that the conviction rate is a result of prosecutors being incredibly selective of which cases they bring to trial, only selecting cases with strong evidence of wrongdoing with a high likelihood of a guilty plea in exchange for a more lenient sentence, rather than any nefarious corruption or underhanded tactics like wrongful confessions.

The second issue is that if the high conviction rate is a result of a need or desire for prison labour then it would also be visible in the incarceration rate, however this is not the case. Japan has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. To emphasise just how few people Japan actually jails, let's look at some other countries countries. Incarceration rates are per 100k population: US: 639, England and Wales: 130, China: 122, Spain: 122, South Korea: 105, Canada: 104, France: 93, Hong Kong: 90, Italy: 89, Germany: 69, Japan: 38. Japan has half the prison population that the UK does while having twice the population, if they are jailing people with the intention of using them for slave labour they are doing a terrible job at it.

The only conclusion that can be drawn here is that the conviction rate is irrelevant to the discussion, and while it's still entirely possible to argue that Japan has an unintentional modern slavery problem as a result of prison labour it seems less of an argument against Japan specifically and more of an issue with prison labour in general. But if the problem is with Japan specifically, just how big of a problem is it? Using the globalslaveryindex[0] mentioned in a parent comment we can take a ham fisted approach and simply assume that all Japanese prisoners are slaves, add the Japanese prison population (around 50k) to the estimated number of modern slaves, and, well, Japan still has an incredibly low number of modern slaves, lower than the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and South Korea despite being roughly twice the population of any of these countries, and a quarter of the number of modern slaves that the US has despite being half the population. While I don't agree with prison labour I also don't think it's modern slavery, but even assuming that it is it's incredibly hard to come to a conclusion where Japan looks worse than any other comparable country.

[0] https://www.globalslaveryindex.org/2018/data/maps/#prevalenc...

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