RECKONING COSTS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 6, 7 July 1938, Page 8

RECKONING COSTS

The scriptural reference to the wisdom of calculating the cost of a tower before beginning to build it has very direct application to the Government's social security scheme. The Government dislikes taking advice from the Opposition, but if it gives no more attention to Mr. Forbes's warning than a mocking question, "where is the money to come from?" it may lay the foundations of a tower that will exhaust the resources of the country. The complete cost of \ the scheme has never been disclosed. We have drawn attention to several of the incompletely calculated factors—provision lor employment promotion, for instance, and hospital expansion. The Prime Minister has said only that the extra cost will come from the Consolidated Fund and not how the Consolidated Fund will find the requisite money. Moreover, the optimistic anticipations are based on calculations in most prosperous years and the easy assumption that prosperity will increase, with no recession and no check from the imposition of heavier burdens on industry. Social security on such a basis ha* no satisfactory guarantee of equitable permanence. If the expectation of rapidly in.creasing prosperity is disappointed, the scheme will be maintainable only by impoverishing demands upon taxpayers. This will aggravate the glaring inequity which is inherent in a scheme which is "universal" for taxation, but with a means test for pensions.