Missing the point: facts and rhetoric about Japan's fiscal crisis

This chapter argues that the public discourse’s obsession with whether the current course of Japan’s fiscal policy, due to the massive bulk of its public debts, will eventually run into a fiscal crisis widely misses the point. The genuine question to us is the constitutional problem: the ongoing fiscal-monetary policy regime is already amounting to the re-configuration of the fiscal constitution, which must be done via an honest discussion and clear choice by the democratic polity. The public discourse over the current fiscal-monetary policy regime, on both sides of the debate, pays little attention to its constitutional significance, hence dismantling the democratic accountability mechanism on fiscal/monetary matters. In the author’s view, this amounts to the true “fiscal crisis.”