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The story
After the Supreme Court ruled that past cuts to welfare benefit standards were “illegal,” the government plans to set aside 105.5 billion yen in this fiscal year’s supplementary budget for additional payments. The payments are expected to cover roughly 3 million households in total, with a payout of around 200 billion yen overall — but there are concerns that 1.36 million households whose addresses or circumstances have since changed may never see the money. On 5ch, discussion focused less on the additional payments themselves and more on the welfare system as a whole: its merits, the rising number of elderly recipients, and comparisons with minimum wage, with opinions sharply divided.
Roughly 3 million households are eligible for the additional payments — about 136 of them reportedly already “self-sufficient”?
As mentioned above, following the government’s court defeat, 105.5 billion yen has been written into this fiscal year’s supplementary budget to make additional payments to past welfare recipients, with the total expected to reach roughly 200 billion yen.
However, the objective basis for these figures has never been disclosed — in practice, only the administrative paperwork is being pushed forward.
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Is there really anyone who "deserves" it? There's plenty of work out there if you're not picky. And if you're too sick to work, there's disability pension.
The take-up rate is supposedly only 20%, so there are definitely people who qualify but aren't claiming it.
Disability pension amounts differ by grade, you know. I'm Employees' Pension disability grade 3, and I only get 570,000 yen a year.
So if you became disabled and couldn't find work anywhere, nobody would hire you, you'd obviously accept a death sentence after 5 years too, right? Being disabled doesn't guarantee you'll get disability pension, and even if you do, it might only be a tiny amount — you good with that? Don't you dare change your tune later.
I think that's actually a good idea. Welfare was supposed to be premised on short-term self-sufficiency to begin with.
What a shortsighted idiot. Most welfare recipients are elderly. So can you actually find them jobs that pay enough to live on? No employer thinks they can profitably work an 80-year-old full-time. And communal living would need staff or a team to set the rules and track everyone's situation — that costs tax money too. No objections to that?
Do you know the per-person cost of running a prison? Apparently it's over 200,000 yen a month per inmate — facility construction, upkeep, staffing, housing, healthcare, and everything else. So forget civil liberties for a second, that kind of proposal isn't even economically rational.
This'll do. It's supposed to be a minimum standard of living, after all.
There is a partial support system covering just rent.
Though it means finally leaving that unhinged parent you've been living with forever and becoming independent lol
Exempt from resident tax and water bills. Free public baths. Free entry to Tokyo metropolitan facilities like museums. Free Toei subway and Toei buses.
By the way, you can get from central Tokyo all the way to a hot spring using nothing but Toei transit.
If you meet the eligibility requirements, go ahead and claim it. Just don't do it while you're sitting on money.
Welfare really is the ultimate move for the elderly. It's so good you could almost call anyone who diligently saved for retirement since they were young a fool.
If a lot of citizens started thinking that cynically, the whole system would collapse in no time, though.
Collapsing it is the whole point.
How big is the total national budget anyway? What's the domestic net worth versus the net external assets? There's a lot more going on than that.
Pension was never a system designed so you could "definitely live on the pension alone" lol
Envious of living on about 70,000 yen a month? Seriously? lol
If you can't get by on National Pension alone, you can just apply for welfare, you know.
Too generous? How much do you actually think it is?
Work full-time at minimum wage, get hit with taxes and social insurance, and your take-home still never falls below welfare payments. And full-time employees get paid above minimum wage to begin with anyway.
The Minimum Wage Act literally requires consistency with welfare policy. If welfare payments are adjusting to inflation and minimum wage isn't keeping up at all, take it up with the government, or tell your company to raise your pay lol
Minimum Wage Act
(Principle of Regional Minimum Wages)
Article 9: To guarantee a minimum wage floor for low-paid workers, regional minimum wages (meaning the minimum wage set for each region) shall be determined for every region across the country without exception.
2. Regional minimum wages shall be set with consideration for workers' cost of living and wages in the region, as well as the ordinary wage-paying capacity of local businesses.
3. In considering workers' cost of living under the preceding paragraph, due regard shall be given to maintaining consistency with welfare policy, so that workers can maintain a healthy and culturally minimal standard of living.
Just have them pull weeds or pick up litter or something.
Restraining people means you become responsible for whatever happens to them during that time, you get that? Even for a natural disaster, if you get sued afterward, that's extra legal costs and time. Even ordinary company employees are told by their employer to leave promptly once work is done, because if someone gets hurt on the premises it becomes a workers' comp case, and even a sudden illness creates a duty to help. You really don't understand how society works.
That would be false imprisonment. Do you even know what you're talking about?
Not really following, but…
Full-time employees are also covered by their local minimum wage.
What I meant was that full-timers earn more than minimum wage on an hourly basis. Is there really a company where full-time employees only get paid minimum wage?
That government waste you're talking about IS welfare ("namapo"), isn't it? lol
Plenty of full-time employees don't even know they're covered by minimum wage law.
Re: #112
If every member of a household is hospitalized, housing assistance gets cut for that period. But rent is still rent whether you're hospitalized or not, so that's a strange rule.
Since monthly rent still applies even while hospitalized, I guess it is rough in that sense…
So you can't really say medical assistance just cancels out livelihood assistance plus housing assistance. Taxpaying households spend about 400,000 yen per person a year on medical costs, versus over 1,000,000 yen per "head" (using the animal counter "匹" — a dehumanizing dig at recipients) for welfare households — how you weigh that is the real question. It's the demographic that can't survive without being pumped full of hospital visits and medication…
Well, 60% of welfare recipients are dealing with illness, injury, or disability. And 55% of current recipients are elderly, and even the healthy ones among them are basically pre-illness cases. For old folks it's not about a cure, just ongoing symptom management, so treatment drags on for years.
https://prcdn.freetls.fastly.net/release_image/116196/67/116196-67-ed6dbc3845a1b4039f86c709e1b0da58-1200×742.png?width=1950&height=1350&quality=85%2C75&format=jpeg&auto=webp&fit=bounds&bg-color=fff
And protecting everyone like that no matter what is exactly how you end up here. If you're going to say "protect them even more," you'd better be on board with raising taxes too, right?
Background and Key Points of This Debate
This additional payment is an after-the-fact remedy following the Supreme Court’s ruling that the procedure used to cut livelihood assistance standards since 2013 was illegal, in a class-action suit over those cuts. The payments are said to cover roughly 3 million households in total, but among the original recipients, 1.36 million households can no longer be tracked or confirmed as eligible — due to relocation, death, or having left the welfare system since then — meaning whether the money actually reaches them depends on local government records. What divided the thread wasn’t the payment itself so much as the welfare system as a whole: the rising share of elderly recipients, comparisons with minimum wage, moral-hazard arguments, and on the flip side, criticism of practical shortcomings in medical and housing assistance. Meanwhile, the article itself also notes that the funding rationale behind the additional payment figures has never been clearly explained, so their appropriateness is still an open question.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (News Speed+) thread “Unlawful ‘welfare benefit cuts’ ruled ‘illegal’ by the Supreme Court → government to pay an additional ¥105.5 billion in compensation, but 1.36 million households fear they’ll ‘get not one yen’.”
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