The Diet is now deliberating the government's tax code bill, which includes maintaining the provisionally raised gasoline and other road-related tax rates for 10 years from fiscal 2008. The bill has become a hot political issue.

The ruling and opposition parties should avoid focusing merely on whether the provisional tax rates should be maintained or not. They should discuss road-related taxes and the government's expressway construction plan based on revenues from these taxes from a wider viewpoint of introducing rationality and transparency to the plan as well as reforming the road-related tax system with people's well-being in mind.

The government plan calls for spending ¥59 trillion on building 14,000 km of expressways in the next 10 years. The 14,000-km figure was carried over from the fourth national development plan written in 1987, which set 2000 as a goal year. There may be a need for expressways but the details of the plan are not disclosed. What kinds of criteria will be used in deciding which expressways are necessary is unclear. The government originally planned to spend ¥65 trillion. In December 2007, it and the ruling parties revised the planned spending to ¥59 trillion. What factors led to the revision are also unclear.