Taxes

Have you seen the TV commercial in which a woman says to the man who is about to smoke, "If you want to smoke, go to Japan!!". Then the scene cuts to a newscaster announcing "In Japan, smoker refugees are increasing....." with some footage of people on a rubber dinghy being welcomed by Japanese guys on the beach. I think it's very funny.
The plan of increasing taxes on tobacco and low malt beer was suspended this time at the Diet (Japan's parliament), but they went ahead and approved the consolidate taxation for corporates. Also they increased the medical costs that have to be paid out by patients. I can understand that the government has to increase their "income" by increasing the tax, but if it were a company this business model wouldn't work. You can't put prices on your services up year after year and not cut your own costs. Maybe the politicians think they're making sure the nation doesn't go bankrupt, but when they don't seem to want to cut their costs while companies here are really struggling, then you seem them for the rats that they really are...
As a recent survey conducted by EIU, Economist group, shows that Japan is the most expensive country in the world in which to do business. The corporate tax is the second highest. Japan scored 100, on the scale, compared to the US with a score of 66.3. I wonder if we will have less Gaishi, or "refugees", coming to Japan in the future...?

Taxi

How often do you take a taxi? One night, I was too tired and took a taxi back home, and was more than a little surprised. The taxi had a car navigator system but even so, the driver was about to fail making my turn-off, it I hadn't noticed and told him where it was. Obviously he was a new driver and didn't know the back roads as well as me.
Then the next surprise was that he also had a speed radar detector. Suddenly a machine voice announced, "Slow down, slow down, danger, danger! and after a couple more minutes we passed by a police car. I might have been impressed except that we were only doing 20 km/h...
The newspapers say that the Japanese unemployment rate for October reached 5.4%, which is the worst since 1953. I bet that there will be a lot more new taxi drivers in Tokyo over the coming months. While they may not know where they are going, I hope they at least will drive carefully, and make their customers comfortable.