Internal Affairs and Communications Minister Heizo Takenaka said Sunday it will be necessary to secure new revenue sources to deal with an expected increase in the ratio of public funding to the basic pension scheme in fiscal 2009, such as through raising the consumption tax.
"We have to come up with some kind of measures," Takenaka said on a Fuji TV talk show. "It is inevitable that we call for (an increase in) the public's tax burden."
But Takenaka maintained his stance of giving more priority to spending cuts and overcoming deflation than to tax increases in dealing with debt-laden national finances.
"We don't want to hike the (current 5 percent) consumption tax to 20 to 25 percent," Takenaka said. "The role of politics is to minimize any increase."
On the same program, ruling Liberal Democratic Party Secretary General Tsutomu Takebe said, "We have to create an environment in which we can ask the public for tax increases."
To facilitate public understanding, he said it is important to cut the number of government employees.
"We'll go all the way to restructure the public servant personnel system and the public sector," Takebe said. "Public officials tend to move easily toward tax increases, but we should not allow that."
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