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posted by martyb on Thursday January 31 2019, @06:20PM   Printer-friendly
from the three-hots-and-a-cot dept.

Jail is not top of most people's bucket list of places to visit, but for some it is becoming increasingly attractive. I had heard anecdotal stories of homeless in the UK committing petty crimes in the hope of being given a warm bed and a meal, but in Japan it seems that the elderly are taking things to a whole new level:

Japan is in the grip of an elderly crime wave - the proportion of crimes committed by people over the age of 65 has been steadily increasing for 20 years. The BBC's Ed Butler asks why.

At a halfway house in Hiroshima - for criminals who are being released from jail back into the community - 69-year-old Toshio Takata tells me he broke the law because he was poor. He wanted somewhere to live free of charge, even if it was behind bars.

"I reached pension age and then I ran out of money. So it occurred to me - perhaps I could live for free if I lived in jail," he says.

"So I took a bicycle and rode it to the police station and told the guy there: 'Look, I took this.'"

The plan worked. This was Toshio's first offence, committed when he was 62, but Japanese courts treat petty theft seriously, so it was enough to get him a one-year sentence.

Small, slender, and with a tendency to giggle, Toshio looks nothing like a habitual criminal, much less someone who'd threaten women with knives. But after he was released from his first sentence, that's exactly what he did.

"I went to a park and just threatened them. I wasn't intending to do any harm. I just showed the knife to them hoping one of them would call the police. One did."

Altogether, Toshio has spent half of the last eight years in jail.

I ask him if he likes being in prison, and he points out an additional financial upside - his pension continues to be paid even while he's inside.

"It's not that I like it but I can stay there for free," he says. "And when I get out I have saved some money. So it is not that painful."

Toshio represents a striking trend in Japanese crime. In a remarkably law-abiding society, a rapidly growing proportion of crimes is carried about by over-65s. In 1997 this age group accounted for about one in 20 convictions but 20 years later the figure had grown to more than one in five - a rate that far outstrips the growth of the over-65s as a proportion of the population (though they now make up more than a quarter of the total).

To my mind, there is something wrong with the way we take care of the elderly or those who are significantly poorer than the average when their most attractive option is jail.


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Saturday February 02 2019, @01:35AM (1 child)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Saturday February 02 2019, @01:35AM (#795272)

    Above whatever that arbitrary "tax floor" is, I'm all for flat-tax

    In my opinion this is contradictory to your other statements. ie "tax based upon disposable income", and your comment about Warren Buffet.

    Then you misunderstand what I mean by flat tax. Warren Buffet's income is so large compared to the disposable income threshold that he would effectively pay near the flat tax rate. His secretary might have only 50% of her income above the threshold, so her effective overall tax rate would be 50% of the flat tax rate.

    Still, government tries to shape the behavior of the wealthy by providing tax incentives for certain activities, and these programs end up lowering their effective tax rates, rather dramatically as compared to the average citizen.

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  • (Score: 1) by Gault.Drakkor on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:28AM

    by Gault.Drakkor (1079) on Thursday February 07 2019, @01:28AM (#797545)

    It reads like you are arguing an income tax setup with two brackets. The low bracket of say 0% tax below and say 20% above .
    It is the equivalent of saying flat tax of 20% for everybody and non-refundable tax credit of for everybody. That to me, that is close enough to flat tax to call it so.

    Under that setup as income approaches infinity the marginal tax rate and effective tax rate converge on the flat rate. Which you did not say in the post I replied to. But do in your reply to me.

    But you also say: "tax based upon disposable income." So I am am saying that flat tax even with a large 0% tax threshold is not a tax based upon disposable income. Mostly because cost of living is not proportional to income. People like Warren Buffet have a more then proportional disposable income.

    Or ignoring income tax: a person with 30K income pays all to living expenses person with 60k is pretty similar. 100k they could have 100k-80k of disposable income 1M they could have 1M-100kof disposable income. 1G income could have 1G-200k of disposable income. If you want a flat income tax of 20% after 50k income; the people above 200k income have potentially greater and greater disposable incomes.

    In my opinion if you want to tax based upon disposable income, progressive tax system is the way to go. So as long as the system ensures that for each marginal income dollar earned, the net after tax is a positive value along the whole tax function, people will have incentive to earn more income. Progressive income tax is the easiest approximation of being able to do a fixed tax of disposable income.