Is the DPJ eating a crazy woman’s breakfast?

Oh dear. The DPJ are in a spot of entirely predictable policy trouble. We were all aware that if the DPJ got in then there would be a “period of adjustment”, in which the DPJ would go from proposing things which might win an election to things which might actually work.

These two things sometimes are at loggerheads. And just now the DPJ finds itself arguing for two contradictory policies; the policy aimed at reducing Greenhouse gas emissions by 30%, and the policy to reduce the toll on freeways to zero. I am not sure how many others have caught onto this one, but at a minimum this is (further) evidence that the DPJ does not yet have a unified vision for the country. Taxing petrol and discouraging private road use is a good way to drive down greenhouse gas emissions, and the link between these two policies is so obvious that one wonders why the DPJ did not detect it themselves.

One only hopes that Kan Naoto as the head so-called “national strategy” will be able to harmonize the DPJ’s disparate policies. If this kind of oversight does not occur then the DPJ will not be able to deliver a better Japan than LDP likely would have, something the voters will punish later on. Indeed, the honeymoon for Hatoyama and the DPJ is fast fading.