The Press TUESDAY, DECEMBER 29, 1936. Saving and Spending

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21977, 29 December 1936, Page 6

The Press TUESDAY, DECEMBER 29, 1936. Saving and Spending

Being fond of caucuses, from which it invariably reports to the press a perfect unanimity upon the means and ends of policy, the Government might do worse than assemble its talents for a discussion on saving and spending. It would help the Prime Minister, perhaps, to be told by the member for Invercargill that the Government does not want the recipients of higher wages to save but to spend all their extra money. " Money," Mr Denham said in an address to the Southland Storemen's Union, "should not be invested; it " should be kept in circulation." As for old age, there should be no need for people to "run to the bank"; they would have "a superannuation scheme to provide for them." Mr Savage might be assisted to decide which of his last two statements on the subject it is that he wants to stand by. Though in the later of the two he took the opposite direction to Mr Denham. declaring that the Labour party was " not opposed to individual saving," the Prime Minister's gymnastic skill has proved itself fully equal to the difficulty of leaping back to a position from which he may follow Mr Denham. He has only to reaffirm statements made a fortnight earlier—" This scratching, scraping, starvation system of individual saving "strangles the economic freedom and well- " being of a nation. We have got to stop that. ". . . . By the time we have put our full pro- " gramme into operation there will be nothing "left to do in the way of providing safeguards " for the security, health, and happiness of the "individual"—and he will have done something, perhaps enough, to secure the Labour party's unanimous assent to Mr Denham's interpretation of its policy to the Southland storemen. That it would not require much persuading to plunge after him is to be suspected. Mr Savage's first statement bore all the signs of authenticity, and he did not deny it; his second, issued without explicit reference to the first, was lame and sheepish. The first, with its clarion cry for "a system of superannuation that will be a substantial safeguard and the onl;, necessary safeguard," is the one to capture the Labour members, who have more taste and aptitude for drum and trombone economics than for the dull study of ways and means. But Mr Savage or whoever else has put about among the party these strange notions, founded, apparently, on a very superficial and careless reading of J. A. Hobson, has done a mischievous thing, weakening with a delusive hope the individual's prudence and sense of personal responsibility. It is' useless to contest at length such senseless statements as that "money should not be invested"; their meaning runs like spilt quicksilver. But a politician who says that and can instantly go on to promise that " taxation pincers might "soon be put in a bit deeper," in the attempt to redistribute wealth, has uttered in two breaths enough dangerous doctrine to wreck a Government among the ruins of industry.