OUR FISCAL POLICY.

Evening Star, Issue 5230, 9 December 1879, Page 4

OUR FISCAL POLICY.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —I notice in your issue of the 6th a letter from Mr J. G. S. Grant informing the Government how to raise the wind. Two things he suggests have been suggested in your columns on two or three previous occasions, and they are to re-impose the duty on tea and sugar and to abolish free education. Mr J. G. S. Grant says “ We are not paupers, and do not want a free State education,” Do you know whether Mr Grant has any children ? lam glad that his circumstances have altered ; it is not many weeks since he was crying as loud as any of us about hard times. Sir, if there is one thing more than another that I am thankful for, it is for a free education for my children. Are you aware that hundreds of poor children would receive no education but what little their parents could give them were our present system to be abolished ? I am willing to pay a little more for my sugar and tea ; but do not take my children’s schooling from them, I know, of course, that we pay for it indirectly ; but we do not feel it so much as Laving to pay a lump sum for it. I can assure you, sir, that times are hard—so hard that if things do not alter I shall have to give up taking the Star, a paper I have taken for the last eight years. I disagree with you and others about the unfairness of the property tax. Our liabilities have to be met, and the poor cannot help much these times. It is a difficulty which has got to be surmounted, and if it is shuffled off of property it will have to go on something else. I hope the Government will stick to it, unless a better policy can be shown them. To my thinking it is an honest tax ; it falls on themselves as well as others. We have now a fine lot of immigrants arriving on our shores ; I trust the Government will fee it to be their duty to settle as many on the land as possible. We want to spend our money on reproductive works. With a little good management our estate would soon be made to flourish again.—l am, etc.. Younu Briton. Dunedin, December 8.