Asoﾂ’s Latest Gaffe!

Otto said:

According to the minutes of a Nov. 20 meeting of the Council on Fiscal and Economic Policy, Aso said: "Why do I have to pay for medical expenses for old people (who become sick) because they drink and eat all the time and do nothing?" "They were very active when they were students, but now their medical expenses (which the government must shoulder) are much more than mine," he said. "It's because I take a walk every morning and do other things. I pay more taxes than they do."
Unbelievable! In previous a thread I had written about the possibility of a consumption tax hike! I thought, where's the outrage!? What struck me most was the ﾂ"elitistﾂ" tone to his comments. As if he has ever done a decent job in his life. I saw a documentary yesterday (Close-Up ﾅ陳ｻ窶佚｣)about the growing number of working poor in this country. Let me tell you, it brought tears to my eyes. These people are treated like garbage, and now with the global market meltdown, large numbers of hard-working Japanese people are being laid off by the hundreds each day. Then to hear this pompous daddy's boy talk about his taxes being misused only upsets me more. Let me tell you having a family member being disabled, and hearing comments from a rich individual about the physically weak, being a tax burden is quite unbelievable. How can this man steer this country in the right direction again? There was a terrorist attack in India the same day the story broke. This worked out quite well for the Prime Minister. Otherwise his gaffe would have been the top story on the evening news.

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I saw a documentary yesterday (Close-Up ﾅ陳ｻ窶佚｣)about the growing number of working poor in this country. Let me tell you, it brought tears to my eyes. These people are treated like garbage, and now with the global market meltdown, large numbers of hard-working Japanese people are being laid off by the hundreds each day.

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Astroboy said:

So I am wondering what is working poor... or Japanese media is misleading, or working poor is not working poor in terms of global standard, or All Japan is working poor ?

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But if I check "Gini Coefficient World Human Development Report 2007-2008", Japan is one of the least wealth gap countries in the world.

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General problems of measurement
* Comparing income distributions among countries may be difficult because benefits systems may differ. For example, some countries give benefits in the form of money while others give food stamps, which might not be counted by some economists and researchers as income in the Lorenz curve and therefore not taken into account in the Gini coefficient. The USA counts income before benefits, while France counts it after benefits, making the USA appear more unequal vis-a-vis France than it is.

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* The Gini coefficient of different sets of people cannot be averaged to obtain the Gini coefficient of all the people in the sets: if a Gini coefficient were to be calculated for each person it would always be zero. For a large, economically diverse country, a much higher coefficient will be calculated for the country as a whole than will be calculated for each of its regions. (The coefficient is usually applied to measurable nominal income rather than local purchasing power, tending to increase the calculated coefficient across larger areas.)
For this reason, the scores calculated for individual countries within the EU are difficult to compare with the score of the entire US: the overall value for the EU should be used in that case, 31.3[4], which is still much lower than the United States', 45.[5] Using decomposable inequality measures (e.g. the Theil index T converted by 1 － e － T into a inequality coefficient) averts such problems.

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