NATIONAL INCOME AND EXPENDITURE.

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Issue 3546, 20 November 1882, Page 4

NATIONAL INCOME AND EXPENDITURE.

(The Times, September 1) Professor Leone Levi lias collected soruo astonishing statistics for the instruction or bewilderment of the British Association. No mind can grasp very clearly tho idea of a million. Professor Levi is not contented with any figures less than hundreds and thousands of millions. Statisticans have invented turnstiles through which they pass mankind and its morals and expenditure. Stationing himself at one of these, Professor Levi has marshalled the inhabitants of the United Kingdom as they go in and out, in divisions of laboring classes and middle and higher classes. He has calculated how many belong to this order, and how many to that. He knows what each section spends, and what it receives for its outlay. Members of the several ranks who are not statisticians feel like patients during a clinical lecture, while the masters of tho art of averages are sifting and probing and analysing their doings and sufferings. Happily, Englishmen may discover from yesterday's report of the proceedings of the Economic Science Department at Southampton that they have emerged from the arithmetical crucible not altogether disgraced. The population of the United Kingdom enjoys an income of a thousand millions sterling. Of this £436,000,000 represents the earnings of the twenty-six millions of the working classes, and £454,000,000 the revenue of the remaining eleven millions. Tho gross personal expenditure of the working classes in the course of a year is £423,000,000, and of the middle and higher classes 35454,000,000. Only a moderate proportion, however, of these sums is consumed on luxuries. Eighty per cent of the earnings of the working classes is consumed in necessaries, and eighty-six per cent of those of the middle and higher classes. Professor Levi estimates that the outlay on the things he calls luxuries is diminishing in comparison with that on the necessaries.: Bread and meat he reckons as necessaries, and alcohol as a luxury. The expenditure on the former he shows is rising, and the expenditure on the latter falling. Whether for luxuries or for necessaries, he solaces this country by arguing that to a certain extent its expenditure is more apparent than real. By the personal expenditure of the various classes he signifies the amounts they disburse, man by man. But the nation is not the poorer by all which its citizens spend. Some part of the outlay is, for the nation, only apparent. While it seems to spend annually £878.000,000, the net expenditure is only £784,700,000. This is all it makes away with and which disappears. The other £193,300,000 consists of taxes and profits on distribution, together with results of other arrangements for transferring money intact from one pocket to another. Luxuries offer an especially favorable field for the exercise of this legerdemain. Thus, though the public imagines it dissapates in 'luxuries and waste' £150,000,000 a year, it does not actually waste more than half that sum. Nearly half simply changes its quarters. Of the twenty per cent, of his wages which the workmen fondly believes he squanders, the State and the publican intercept a good moiety. Although the upper classes do not surrender so much of their fancied expenditure on luxuries to their purveyors and rulers, they cannot succeed in eating and drinking and wearing away tho whole of the fourteen per cent, they devote to luxuries. A respectable fraction of the percentage is preserved for use over again by others. If money could be traced, it would probably bo found that a very considerable proportion of the large sums directly and consciously economised by individuals out of their yearly income is derived from the luxurious expenditure of their neighbors. These savings are computed by Professor Levi, for the laboring classes, at £13,000,000 a year, and for the rest of the community at £110,000,000. So much even in hard times like the present is asserted by Professor Levi to be left at the end of the year to swell the capital of the nation and augment its reproductive powers. Every one will agree with him that £123,000,000 makes a 'handsome annual surplus.'