・Japanese companies have doubled their internal reserves since the burst of the bubble and reached 484 trillion yen at the end of fiscal year 2021, and internal reserves are the balance after companies pay taxes and dividends from profits, so to speak, corporate savings. That has doubled in the past ten years. The number of people with assets of 1 million dollars or more in Japan is 3.99 million, second only to America, and there are currently personal financial assets of 2200 trillion yen or more in Japan, but most of them are held by some wealthy people (P14)
・Consumption tax is hardly used for social security expenses, etc., so when it comes to what it was used for, it was used to fill in the gaps in tax cuts for large enterprises and high-income earners. Right after 1997, when the consumption tax was raised from 3% to 5%, corporate tax and income tax were lowered one after another. Large enterprises were subject to corporate tax cuts, and those subject to income tax cuts were high-income earners (P19) The corporate tax rate, which was 43.3% until 01988, was reduced by about half to 23.2% in 2018 (P70)
・The actual contribution rate of personal income tax on national income is only 7.2% in Japan, which is low compared to America 12.2%, England 13.5%, Germany 12.6%, and France 10.2%. This shows that the burden ratio of high-income earners is low (P25)
・In order to recover the consumption tax increase, the price of the product must be raised, but if the price was not raised, the shopkeeper would cut his own income for the consumption tax increase, so when consumption tax was introduced, businesses with sales of 30 million yen or less were exempt from paying consumption tax. Sales are not income or profit; the remainder after deducting expenses from sales becomes profit (income), and actual income is almost always several million yen. This tax exemption system was drastically reduced in 2004 to businesses with sales of 10 million or less, and consumption tax obligations were imposed on most businesses (P34)
・In the invoice system, it is necessary to receive an “qualified invoice” from the payment destination as a condition of deducting “consumption tax already paid at the time of payment of expenses, etc.” If they don't issue it, that amount of consumption tax cannot be deducted, and in order to issue it, you must become a taxable business operator. Duty-free businesses with sales of 10 million yen or less are not taxable businesses, so they cannot originally issue qualified invoices, and if they cannot issue them, there is a risk that the business partner will not be able to give you a job. Therefore, even businesses that are exempt from tax have to dare to become taxable businesses and pay consumption tax (P36)
・Tax revenue from excise tax was 2 trillion yen, and tax revenue at the time of introduction of consumption tax was in the 4 trillion yen range, so if excise tax was expanded slightly, there was no need to make consumption tax etc. Prime Minister Nakasone at the time had the idea of trying to expand excise tax without introducing a new joint tax, but it was abandoned because industry groups subject to excise tax fiercely opposed it (P89)
・There is a premise that consumption tax is applied only to what is consumed domestically, so it is not applied to what is exported, but consumption tax such as material costs is paid at the stage of domestic manufacturing, so “consumption tax paid when exported” is a return tax (P92)
・The reason the Ministry of Finance has promoted consumption tax is that income tax and corporate tax cannot be relied upon as stable financial resources. As for income tax and corporate tax, members of parliament promise tax cuts in order to keep the public in a good mood every time there is an election. Moreover, income tax and corporate tax are affected by the economy. Consumption tax is rarely messed with by politicians because of elections that cannot be increased or decreased much once created due to systemic issues. Also, consumption tax is expected to generate a fixed amount of tax revenue regardless of the economy, because citizens consume a fixed amount of money in order to live even when the economy is bad (P127)
・Currently, more than 900,000 university students receive interest-bearing scholarships and go to school This figure is close to half of university students (P135)
