Labour and Taxation.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18526, 30 October 1925, Page 10

Labour and Taxation.

We do not know where Mr Sullivan fonml the £3,900,000 a year which he named in his letter yesterday as the suni granted to the wealthy in taxation reductions. The Labour manifesto fixed the reduction in income-tax at £7,009,445 in four years. The Labour candidate for Timeru recently got the amount up to £5,303,032 in three years. The Labour leader, liowever, has since named £150,000 as the estimated remission for one year, so perhaps Mr Sullivan felt it his duty to restore at least the vanished millions. ' But it does not matter much. The Government lias not remitted millions annually to the wealthy, or to anybody. It collected a little.over six millions from all incomes »f or the year ended March 31st, 1922, and a little Jess than three and a half millions for the year ended March 31st, 1925, so that the total reduction for that whole period is only a little more than two and a half millions, and the average annual reduction far less. than one million. But quite half of the total income-tax remissions go to companies, which Labour itself says have been improperly taxed, so' that- there is a verysmall portion of Mr Sullivan's three and nine-tenth millions remaining for his "wealthy people." But that also does not matter much. For the whole object of these Labour references to income-tax remissions is to suggest that there, has been an "iniquitous " transfer" of the country's financial burders from the rkh to the poor; that the payer of income-tax has been enabled to pass his load over to the [payers of Customs duties; and that this increased anxiety is niore than the people can bear. Actually there have been no new Customs duties imposed during the last three years, with the exception of a small duty on sugar to guarantee its continued manufacture in our own country. The revenue from "Customs has increased, first because there has been an enormous increase in the importation and use of motor-cars, spirits, and motor tyres, and in the second place because everybody of every rank in life has been buying every kind of dutiable connnod*ity more freely. Instead of an increase in the duties on necessaries of life there has been a decrease—3d

a pound, for example, on tea, and Sd on pipe tobacco. And instead of Customs increasing since 1922 by six and a quarter millions, as the Labour Party maintains, they have increased by only two and two-third millions, nearly half of which has been an increase on, or rather from, luxuries. AVhat Labour hopes to gain from these ridiculous mis-statements and misrepresentations is, of course, the votes of the simple and of the unwary; and it certainly will gain many of them. But the avowed object of Labour is " a purer, nobler, and more " equitable order of society." and when a Party making such sanctimonious claims adopts " such disreputable methods it is a warning to the rest of the community to close its ranks.