記者：「首相は来年減税をすると言ったから、グレーゾーンを減らそうとするに相違ない。
I don’t watch TV or follow politics. A dictionary says it’s just any gray area, uncertainty.
Uncertainty about what? Is it a toss up with every new Japanese prime minister whether the taxes will be increased or decreased?
Is it referring to some other issue obvious to everybody that’s related to taxes?
Is it a sentence from a sci-fi world where half the Tokyo is consumed by the Gray Zone that can only be decreased by lowering taxes?
A grey zone in english generally means something is vaguely legal and obviously bypassing the intended mechanics of a law.
In this sentence, attempting to reduce the grey zone is attempting to make sure the law widens the scope to include current loopholes. He wants to make sure everyone is covered by the tax law and nobody gets out of it with weird financial structures.
Ah, from that angle, thank you. I don’t think I’ve ever heard “reduce the gray zone” in English to mean “decrease tax evasion” before, but now it makes sense.
And 税のグレーゾーン does produce search results.
So he promised to reduce taxes, which the reporter interprets as a move to motivate more companies to voluntarily stop using dubious tax evasion schemes and just pay taxes in full.
Not really voluntarily, but you get the idea.
Grey zone is more generic than just tax thing, although I think the term “grey area” is more common:
(idiomatic) An area intermediate between two mutually exclusive states or categories, where the border between the two is fuzzy or ill-defined.
(idiomatic) A topic that is not clearly one thing or the other, that is open to interpretation.
That’s not how I interpreted the sentence, although maybe you’re right. Personally I read this more as “the prime minister will reduce taxes and, in order to make up for the loss of tax income, will crack down on ‘grey area’ loopholes”.
Both present tense and future tense are possible interpretations of とする in the second part, I think.
If it’s future tense, then he’ll do something else in the future to address evasion, the reporter doesn’t yet know what specifically.
If it’s present tense, he might be addressing it by this tax decrease, or again by doing something else.
Both 相違ない and から work in all 3 cases, I think.
Maybe I’d add something to clarify the tense. For example そのうち if I meant the future, or としている if I meant the present.
Yeah I agree that both interpretations seem to make sense, it’s just that logically I can’t imagine that people and companies would start voluntarily opt into more taxes just because the rate was lowered. So it’s more about the meaning of the sentence and less about the grammar purely.
The way I’m thinking about it, evading taxes is not free either, it’s a cost-benefit evaluation.
Say you recognize revenue in an an overseas company because the tax rate is 2% lower, but you have extra admin cost and risks. If your home country lowers the rate, there’s no reason to evade anymore, you can just pay the tax at home and simplify everything.
Or you were paying a part of salaries or bonuses unofficially and untaxed, but now you can afford to have a completely clean payroll.
To me, it’s actually the other way around, and the idea to first lower taxes and after that to try to separately fight evasion to make up for it sounds odd. If they could fight it, why not just fight it and improve the budget? Then you don’t need to lower the taxes anymore.
