The draft fiscal 2023 budget unveiled by the government is a monument to reckless and harmful spending expansion.

The blueprint for the year that starts in April is designed to finance unrestrained growth in defense spending. It marks a sharp increase in the initial budget without offering viable plans to raise the necessary funds.

The proposed budget also includes, as in past years, a huge contingency fund for emergency, unspecified expenditures, which chips away at the foundation of fiscal democracy.

If the envisioned spending plan is adopted without significant changes, fiscal 2023 will go down in history as a year in which an irreparable fiscal mistake was made. We strongly urge the government to make major revisions to the draft budget.

The draft budget endorsed by the Cabinet on Dec. 23 calls for 114 trillion yen ($ 859 billion) in spending. The initial spending package will post one of the largest year-on-year gains on record due to a steep uptick in defense spending ordered by Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.

The government has a history of going on spending sprees funded by supplementary budgets. But it has refrained from providing for any significant increase in expenditures in the initial budget, which sets the foundation for government spending for the fiscal year, except for debt service costs and social security outlays, which inevitably grow due to the aging of the population.

The Kishida administration’s decision to ramp up the defense budget represents a clear break with this fiscal policy stance that has been in place for nearly three decades.

To be sure, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep curbing growth in the initial budget with a growing list of tough policy challenges confronting Japan, including moves toward a carbon-free future and efforts to stem the nation’s demographic decline as well as a harsher national security environment.

The government has been using dubious financing gimmicks to avoid violating this fiscal policy principle, such as financing the initiative to make the nation less vulnerable to natural disasters and other regular policy programs with extra budgets.

If, however, the government intends to scale up the initial budget, which is basically a spending plan to finance permanent programs, it must secure long-term revenue sources to pay for them.

But the Kishida administration’s plan to fund the defense spending expansion is composed of elements whose effectiveness and viability are open to question, including fiscal reforms. This means the defense budget growth is most likely to be financed with debt.

The increase in defense outlays without dependable financing plans is certain to provoke a chorus of calls for spending growth in other areas as well. With the Bank of Japan serving as the principal purchaser of government bonds, the worry is whether the government will be able to resist such pressure for spending growth to maintain fiscal discipline.

Under the draft original budget for fiscal 2023, the government will issue 400 billion yen in construction bonds to finance part of the swelling defense spending.

Successive administrations upheld the principle of not financing defense expenditures with construction bods, which are usually used to fund infrastructure projects, in light of bitter lessons from how debt-financing of a military buildup before World War II led to Japan’s reckless behavior with devastating consequences. The Kishida administration is casually throwing this unwritten but important fiscal rule out of the window.

The spending plan also includes more than 5 trillion yen of contingency funds that can be spent without advance Diet approval. This will continue a disturbing trend that runs counter to one of the basic tenets of modern democracy which requires legislative control of state finances.

The loss of fiscal discipline symbolized by the draft budget is now threatening to harm Japan’s government system itself and pacifist posture as well as its fiscal health.

This approach could lead to a betrayal of not only future generations but also past generations who built this pacifist nation on the back of huge personal sacrifices.

Rectifying this serious mistake is the job of the Diet, which represents the entire nation.

--The Asahi Shimbun, Dec. 24