The budget bill give the priority to the expenditure cut, but not to business-stimulating measures or the stabilisation of peoples' living and so it raise a lot of questions. Although financial structural reform is the important task in mid term, we should first look for the countermeasure to recover the economy and to ease the social uneasiness about the future. Thus, Rengo should not accept the bill, which does not reflect the voice of the people but proposes the cut in the cost of the administration for the insurance against annuity and the sharp raise of medical treatment honorarium.

As regards public works, the bill only prolongs all the long-term plans for two years and does not get to the heart of them. On the other hand, the inclusion of the 200,000,000,000-yen tax cut into the 1997-revised budget should be highly valued. In order to secure the linkage between this and the consumption expansion, the tax cut should be permanent and so Rengo demand to institutionalise income tax cut from 1998 on.

Public funds should be used for the deposit insurance institutions in a transparent way and their use should be strictly limited to the protection of depositors for stabilising the financial system.

The fiscal structural reform bill should be frozen and amended. The following is the proposal for the amendments:

• To institutionalise the income tax cut for the economic recovery;
• To create employment opportunities with an emergency employment counterplan;
• To go on with the reform of the social security system without an automatic cut in the social security cost;
• To review public works with greater emphasis on the people's lives.