Taro Aso – Infinite Unknown

“When a country embarks on deficit financing and inflationism (=quantitative easing) you wipe out the middle class and wealth is transferred from the middle class and the poor to the rich.”
– Ron Paul

Quantitative easing = printing money = creating money out of thin air = increasing the money supply = inflation = hidden tax on monetary assets = theft!!!

“By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”
– John Maynard Keynes

“In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. … This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard.”
– Alan Greenspan

Aaaaand Japan has a debt-to-GDP of over 400%!!!

– This Is The Biggest Problem Facing The World Today: 9 Countries Have Debt-To-GDP Over 300%

– Japan Shocked To Find Abenomics Is Destroying Its Middle Class (ZeroHedge, April 8, 2015):

In central planner “mission accomplished” news, the wealth divide in Japan is growing under Abenomics and middle class citizens are at risk of falling into poverty, The Japan Times says. Despite nightly sound bites from Kuroda, Aso, and Abe himself designed to assuage fears that the country’s gargantuan monetary experiment may yet fail to pull Japan out the deflationary doldrums, some people are getting impatient as the number of households on welfare continues to rise as does the number of nonregular workers. This comes on the heels of the rather amusing news that the country’s Labor Ministry had fabricated a year’s worth of data on wage growth (it turns out there was none) and after countless warnings from us that the PM’s policies would end in spactacularly bad fashion (see here, here, and here for instance).

Here’s more:

Read moreJapan Shocked To Find Abenomics Is Destroying Its Middle Class

– Japan’s Deputy Prime Minister Has A Modest Proposal For The Elderly: “Hurry Up And Die” (ZeroHedge, Jan 21, 2013):

Everyone knows that Japan, whose population is now at the oldest average age it has ever been in its history, sold more adult than baby diapers for the first time in 2012, and is “older” than any nation in the world, has a “demographic problem.” What few may know, however, is that it also has a secret plan to fix said “demographic problem” – a solution that would make Hitler, Goebbels and Stalin proud. Earlier today, Taro Aso, 72 years young, and the deputy PM of the man set to unleash Abenomics on Japan (for the second time, only this time it will be different), suggested that the elderly in Japan should just “hurry up and die” because “You cannot sleep well when you think it’s all paid by the government.”

Uhhhmmm….

Remember that this is the nation that the US is set to imitate at all costs: in everything from the rising debt/GDP, to the interest as a % of revenue, to the demographic distribution of the population, to the absolute collapse in its export base, to, well, everything. And, perhaps, one day to the treatment of the elderly. Because unlike the US, Japan does not have an insolvent Social Security Fund and underfunded liabilities that amount to about 10 times its GDP. Ironically, in the perspective of benefits promised to its society, Japan is in a better place than even the US. But why worry about that now: there is an inauguration going on, and everyone is discussing what the FLOTUS is wearing.

But back to outspoken Aso. From the SCMP:

The 72-year-old Aso, who has a reputation for speaking insensitively, was addressing a meeting on social security issues on the burden imposed by prolonging patients’ lives with treatment.

Describing patients with serious illnesses as “tube persons”, Aso said they should be allowed to die quickly if they wanted to, Kyodo News reported.

“Heaven forbid I should be kept alive if I want to die. You cannot sleep well when you think it’s all paid by the government. This won’t be solved unless you let them hurry up and die.”

He later retracted some of his remarks and admitted it had been inappropriate to make such comments in public. They were his personal opinion, not government policy, he said.

Read moreJapan’s Deputy PM Taro Aso’s Proposal For The Elderly: ‘Hurry Up And Die!’