As the Finance Ministry has closed the invitation for budget requests for fiscal 2014 from various government ministries and agencies, it appears that the government as a whole is not serious enough about restoring financial health to the state coffers. The enactment of a law to raise the consumption tax was ostensibly done to facilitate the nation's financial reconstruction. But the fiscal 2014 budget requests will only intensify the public's impression that the Liberal Democratic Party has not learned from its past policy of relying on pork-barrel projects to boost growth, which caused the national debt to soar.

The budget requests for the general account have reached some ¥99.2 trillion, topping the past record of some ¥98.4 trillion for fiscal 2012. If budget requests for special account budgets for projects related to 3/11 disaster reconstruction are included, total budget requests top ¥100 trillion.

Because the government postponed the decision on whether to raise the consumption tax in April 2014 to this fall, it could not estimate total tax revenues for fiscal 2014. Thus it failed to show the ceiling for total spending. This was an unusual situation. Although the government called for reducing discretionary spending — such as public works projects — by 10 percent from the fiscal 2013 budget, it created loopholes in the form of special spending for priority policies, such as economic growth programs pushed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe as part of his economic policy.