£15½ MILLIONS A DAY

Grey River Argus, 5 April 1943, Page 2

£15½ MILLIONS A DAY

BRITISH WAR COSTS AND INFLATION. LONDON. April 2. Britain’s fiscal year’s income tax receipts for the first time topped £1,000,000.000 or more than £2O per head of population which is approximately twenty-five times as great as the 1913-14 figure and three times that from 1938-39. Britain’s ordinary revenue from direct and indirect taxation and miscellaneous receipts for the yearjust closed reached £2,595.000,000 or £54 per head. This represents 48 per cent, of the national expenditure compared with 37 per cent, in the first full wax’ year. Financial pundits still think that taxation is inadequate in relation to the present expenditure of £15,500,000 daily, especially in view of the persistent pressure to force up wages. There seems to be fairly general agreement on the inflationary dangers of this pressure. Nevertheless, in fairness to the workers it must be recorded that independent figures on prices just issued by the Oxford Institute of Statictics suggest that at the beginning of 1943 the prices for goods other than food, tobacco or drink, have soared between 75 and 100 per cent, since 1938. The institute’ estimates that civilian consumption per head of goods other than food, drink and tobacco, has been virtually halved over this period.