Re: [tlug] Japan to Tax E-Content

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Jason Frisch writes:

 > However, making something that is broken and inefficient look cheap
 > to the general public by subsiding it by an indebted system doesn’t
 > make it cheap for society overall. Someone pays in the end.  Abe is
 > trying to make us pay through inflation (read tax)

Inflation (at less than roughtly 25%/year) isn't a tax.  As somebody
already pointed out, it's a way to slowly default on debt (and to
unstick sticky wages, but that's second order).

 > Japanese taxes and prices are both going to go up rapidly in the
 > coming years. No matter which “economist” tells us that’s a good
 > thing, I don’t buy it!

I'm not going to tell you it's good, but it's unavoidable.  Japan on
average is going to get poorer quite quickly because of the "aging
society", unless they permit immigration at high rates, improve
fertility rates, or come up with a kick-ass way to improve
productivity of the shrinking workforce.  All seem unlikely: they
can't even figure out that TPP is basically a big win, children are an
expensive habit in Japan, and I'll believe in the "third arrow" when I
see it sticking into Abe's butt.  Way to go, Tonto!  Hiyo, Silver, and
away!

Software development is going to be OK, I'm pretty sure.  Y'all are
going to have global corporations as clients and get paid world-class
salaries (on average *chortle*).  But that doesn't help my math-hating
programming-illiterate students much.  Or the farmers and construction
workers.

 > There are many examples where private health is much cheaper
 > (especially if you include the amount the company forks out on your
 > behalf instead of giving it you in wages, and then theres the $80k
 > per person in national debt each). I have heard in the US that
 > people are opting out of Obamacare, and paying $50 a month for
 > unlimited doctor visits.

You must read The Lighthouse.  There isn't really any such free lunch.

It's true that some kinds of treatments can be provided far more
cheaply than general hospitals can do it (see Porter and Teisberg
_Redefining Health Care_ or Christensen, Grossman, and Hwang
_Innovator's Prescription for long lists of case studies), but other
treatments will by the same token become far more expensive, and the
biggest hit will be taken by "Dr. House" levels of diagnosis.  We can
expect that large productivity increases will be generated by
competition and better allocation of resources by untwisting the price
structure.

However, it's an open problem whether we can do much about the biggest
apparent waste: the paperwork.  Selling medical service is different
from selling rice, and it matters.

 > I think more and more will start dropping out of the broken system
 > in Japan too.

What about "socialized medicine -- it's not just a good idea, it's the
law" don't you get?  The privileged (and the self-employed) can do
that to some extent.  The rest of us can't, at all.

 > Anyway, very off topic for a Linux group :-) But all doctors,
 > hospitals and government bodies should be using the cloud
 > to save some of our tax yen!

They're already clearly moving in that direction (at least here in
Tsukuba they are!), but I don't think it's really going to save much.