About a year ago, the government was all in a lather about extending the gasoline tax. Local governments and the ruling coalition, not to mention interested bureaucracies, wanted to continue the tax because they said the revenues were necessary to build more roads. Opposition parties were against the extension, saying they wanted to reduce gasoline prices, which were the highest they'd ever been.

The opposition camp mainly wanted to force a deadlock on the budget so as to precipitate a snap election. The ruling Liberal Democratic Party thus had to find ways of justifying the tax in the face of consumer opposition, and the government tied itself into knots doing so. One of these knots was environmental in nature. Then Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda said that the gasoline tax was also a kind of green tax; if it were removed, gas prices would fall and traffic would increase along with carbon-dioxide emissions. When it was pointed out that such a justification didn't make sense since the tax went to building more roads — which, in theory, encourages more driving — the LDP said that more roads means less traffic congestion and thus less wasted fuel.

This logic may sound self-serving, but it's practically Einsteinian compared to the reasoning behind the road-toll reductions that went into effect last weekend. The toll cuts, based on an idea that you can travel almost anywhere in Japan on a national expressway and not pay more than ¥1,000, were originally proposed to alleviate some of the pain inflicted by high gas prices, but those prices eventually dropped as a result of the global economic meltdown. Still, once a notion is lodged in the government's collective consciousness, it's difficult to remove, so somehow the purpose of the toll reductions has been changed to that of economic stimulus, the idea being that if tolls are cut, more people will drive long distances and spend money in places they wouldn't visit otherwise.