Secretaries General of LDP, Komeito Agree to Issue Cash Handouts; ￥1 Quadrillion GDP by 2040 Sought by Ishiba
Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba speaks at the Prime Minister's Office on Monday.
As a measure against high prices, the secretaries general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and coalition partner Komeito have agreed on providing cash handouts to the public, funding them through tax revenue, according to an LDP executive member who attended the meeting.
LDP Secretary General Hiroshi Moriyama and his Komeito counterpart Makoto Nishida met to discuss the matter in Tokyo on Tuesday morning.
The two parties intend to discuss details including the size of the handouts, when the provision should be started and whether to set an income limit for receiving them, at a later meeting with their policy research council chairpersons, among other members, also in attendance.
'As the public are struggling due to high prices, if tax revenue increases, we must find some way of returning the money to them,' Tetsushi Sakamoto, chairperson of the LDP's Diet Affairs Committee, who attended the meeting, told reporters.
The LDP intends to include the provision of several tens of thousands of yen per capita in cash as a measure against high prices in its campaign pledges for this summer's House of Councillors election, according to senior party members.
'We would like to consider viable, immediately effective handouts,' said Seiji Kihara, chairperson of the LDP's Election Strategy Committee, in Shizuoka City on Monday.
As a way to quickly issue the funds, a proposal has been floated to provide them through bank accounts linked to My Number identification cards.
Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who is also LDP president, met with LDP party executives, including Moriyama and Policy Research Council Chairperson Itsunori Onodera, in the Diet building on Monday. There he instructed the executives to have raising Japan's nominal gross domestic product to ¥1 quadrillion by 2040 and an over 50% increase in the average income by that year be the party's top pledge for the upcoming election.
The nominal GDP for fiscal 2024 was ¥616.9 trillion.
'I'd like to share a specific image of a strong economy with the public,' Ishiba told reporters at the Prime Minister's Office the same day.
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