This time the pump-priming may come too late to relieve a far more serious downturn.
The government also has plenty of scope for pump-priming after achieving a surplus for the past four years running.
In one sense, it is a mystery why Tokyo is continuing to make mistakes when it comes to government pump-priming.
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Milton Friedman famously used Japan to argue that fiscal pump-priming didn't work.
But he said after "pump-priming" the brand, it was now the right time to look for others to come forward to support it.
Other pump-priming measures include increased social security spending, new investment in agriculture and a package of inducements and tax credits to encourage exports.
The more that China's economy relies on the private sector and the less on pump-priming by the state, the faster it is likely to grow.
Towards the end of the year, the first post-Daim budget can be expected to prompt questions about how long Dr Mahathir's pump-priming can sustain him.
It signals a winding down of the pump-priming policy brought in to maintain high economic growth in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of 1997.
In plain English, this means that any investments in pump-priming infrastructure projects, including capital construction schemes, had to be funded by savings in government spending as a whole.
The trouble with both the banking package and the traditional pump-priming is that they fail to address the real problem: that the private sector is awash with debt.
Won't that require pump-priming money while the system is changed?
Moreover, pump-priming has been more effective in Asia than in America or Europe, because Asian households are not burdened with huge debts, so tax cuts or cash handouts are more likely to be spent than saved.
Moreover, even if all the spending is new--extremely unlikely--pump priming loses its effectiveness over time.
On the economy, Bush's program of granting incentives to high-income brackets to drive investment and boost demand and job growth might just succeed in priming the pump.
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