The Japanese government plans to draw up a supplementary budget of more than 3 trillion yen (35 billion dollars) in about 10 days to finance measures to help rebuild areas ravaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, news reports said on Wednesday.
The money is to go to clearing rubble, building temporary housing, and restoring public facilities and infrastructure, the Kyodo News agency reported, citing a blueprint for the budget. The draft said the government would not depend on issuing bonds to fund the supplementary spending in the country with the world’s largest public debt. Its debt is nearly twice the size of its approximately 5-trillion-yen economy.
Instead of bonds, about 2.5 trillion yen for the first extra budget for this financial year, which began Friday, is to come from funds originally earmarked to maintain the government’s contributions to basic pensions at 50 per cent, Kyodo said. The rest is to be generated by scrapping some of the Democratic Party of Japan—led government’s key policies, such as increasing monthly child allowances and introducing more toll—free highways, Kyodo reported.
But some party lawmakers were opposed to shelving some of their major policies.
Last month’s magnitude-9 quake, the largest every recorded in Japan, and the tsunami it unleashed on the east coast killed a confirmed 12,468 people, but as of Wednesday, another 15,091 people were listed as missing, Japan’s National Police Agency said.
