Barrack Obama was “accidentally” referred to as Barrack Osama on some 300 absentee ballots mailed out in early October to voters in Rensselaer County near New York.  That was a mistake that some say was an intentional racial crack to his Muslim background.

Now that Obama has been elected, the latest ethnic remarks are referring to him as Japanese.  The Wall Street Journal referred to the president elect as Obama-san, not for his dna or facial features, but for his insistence on following through with every policy mistake Japan made during its own real estate collapse a decade ago.

In 1992, Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa faced falling property prices and a stock market that had sunk 60% in three years. Mr. Miyazawa’s Liberal Democratic Party won re-election promising that Japan would spend its way to becoming a “lifestyle superpower.” The country embarked on a great Keynesian experiment:

August 1992: 10.7 trillion yen ($85 billion). Japan passed its largest-ever stimulus package to that time, with 8.6 trillion yen earmarked for public works, 1.2 trillion to expand loan quotas for small- and medium-sized businesses and 900 billion for the Japan Development Bank. The package passed in December, but investment kept falling and unemployment rose. By the end of the year, Japan’s debt-to-GDP ratio was 68.6%.

The Wall Street Journal goes on to summarize Japan’s fiscal recklessness and exploding government debt from 1992 through 1999.  Despite clear evidence of Japan’s failed policies, Obama is insistent on abandoning his earlier call for fiscal discipline, and now embraces reckless deficit spending that far eclipses even Japan’s attempts.

The WSJ article breaks down Japan’s failed stimulus programs as follows:

  • 1993 – 13.2 trillion yen and 6.2 trillion yen stimulus, and debt to gdp 74.7%
  • 1994 – 15.3 trillion yen stimulus, and debt to GDP ratio of 80.2%
  • 1995 – 14.2 trillion yen stimulus, and debt to GDP ratio of 87.6%
  • 1998 – 16.7 trillion yen and 23.9 trillion stimulus, and debt to GDP ratio of 114.3%
  • 1999 – 18.0 trillion yen, and debt to GDP ratio of 128.3%

According to Bloomberg, the Japanese total government debt to GDP ratio is expected to hit 180% this year.

So I ask you, Mr. Obama-san, do you really want to be Japanese?!?!?!

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