|
|
Change Your Life! |
Japan: Top policy maker wants tax cuts, more holidays for workers |
|
News
|
April 24, 2000 TOKYO, APR 23 (AP) - Japan's ruling party will try to spur economic growth by reducing inheritance taxes and giving workers more free time, the party's top policy maker was quoted Sunday as saying.
Shizuka Kamei said the Liberal Democratic Party plans to raise the amount of inheritance money excluded from taxation from 600,000 yen (dlrs 5,673) to 10 million yen (dlrs 94,553), according to Kyodo News agency.
Kamei also pledged to give workers longer holidays so they will have more time to spend money, Kyodo said. Kamei was speaking in an interview on Fuji TV.
The Japanese government in recent years has borrowed a record amount of money for spending programs designed to pull the nation's economy out of its worst slump in decades.
Such spending has put Japan among the world's most indebted nations, prompting the government to look for other ways to stimulate economic growth.
Kamei reasoned that parents would be able to transfer more money to their children if a larger portion of their wealth is tax-exempt, Kyodo said.
Less time at work, meanwhile, would give Japanese more time to spend some of the 1.3 quadrillion yen (dlrs 12.3 trillion) locked up in savings accounts, Kamei reportedly said.
"New domestic demand cannot be created if the conventional life pattern and sense of life remain unchanged," Kyodo quoted Kamei as saying. "Economic structural reform is life-structure reform."
|