Back in 2014, I shared a meme with a motto that was perfect for Washington, DC.
Today, let’s do something similar. But instead of a motto specifically for America’s unsavory capital, how about one sentence that summarizes the mentality of all governments.
I used a fill-in-the-blank format because there are so many possible answers.
After all, people in government value taxes more than growth, jobs, competitiveness, and all sorts of other factors.
And one of those other factors is public health, as we can see in this report by Rachel Pannett and Julia Mio Inuma in the Washington Post.
Japanese officials, worried about shifting demographics and a sharp decline in sintax revenue, have come up with an unusual fix for their fiscal woes: encouraging young people to drink more. …Liquor tax revenue in the fiscal 2020 year was about $8.4 billion, a plunge of more than $813 million from the previous year, according to government data. That was the largest decline in three decades — and a cause for alarm for a government facing broad fiscal challenges. …The unorthodox push by bureaucrats to “revitalize the liquor industry” has faced a backlash…on Twitter. …“As long as they can collect taxes, I guess people’s health doesn’t matter.”
When I first saw this story, I thought it was a good fit for one of my columns highlighting “Great Moments in Foreign Government.”
But the final sentence of the excerpt caught my eye and motivated me to take a different approach.
Though the story gets added to my collection of “Strange Moments in Japanese Governance”:
- Licensing regulations for coffee enemas.
- Gimmicky tax and labor policies.
- Amazingly incompetent subsidies.
Yet another reminder that you’ve asked a very strange question if more government is the answer.
———
Image credit: Pictures of Money | CC BY 2.0.
