"TAX SOMEBODY ELSE"

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 147, 19 December 1930, Page 10

"TAX SOMEBODY ELSE"

(To the Editor.) Sir,—Regarding your editorial of the 16th instant, it is admitted that over 90 per cejit. of our national wealth comes from theland; in the final'essence there is nobody else to tax except the primary producer. The balance-sheet of the "man on the land to-day" shows a big adverse balance; at present export and , local prices, all we produce is being sold a long way below cost. Prices for all commodities —money, land, labour, goods, service—are on a level with the top of Mount Cook; the produce we export for sale in the world's markets is down on a Canterbury Plains level. The Year Book reveals that in 1919 the gross value of land and improvements was £445,533,445; in 1928 the value was £631,454,676—an increase in ten years of about two hundred million pounds. Owing to the big drop in the value of our exports, this big ten years' increase has "gone west." Unless something is done to help the producer and ensure his prosperity, it will not be long before the whole of the Dominion—city and country, primary and secondary producer, Government and Civil servants—will all be plunged into distress and difficulty. One step towards prosperity ia to find a way to write off that £200,000,000 to obtain land values' based 'on -export produce values. —I am, etc., LAND.