CAN WE AFFORD IT?

Manawatu Standard, Volume LI, Issue 117, 18 April 1931, Page 2

CAN WE AFFORD IT?

(Contributed by the New Zealand

Welfare League.)

In Government and local body affairs this question, “Can we afford it?” is as necessary as it is in private expenditure. 'When a private individual’s income drops lie asks this question before purchasing some article which would be very acceptable, but which is not absolutely essential, and it is just as necessary for the State or municipality to consider this aspect as it is for the individual.

It is an unpopular thing for any one to put the brake upon public expenditure, but unless such expenditure is brought within the limits of what we can afford, there will be a day of reckoning which will hit the . whole community, and that day will arrive in this country in the near future unless public expenditure is drastically curtailed.

The Prime Minister has realised this and is boldly putting his foot on the brake regardless of the fact that by so doing he will antagonise many people who are deriving temporary benefit from the too lavish expenditure of the past —people who do not realise that they will be the worst sufferers if it continues.

The trouble has grown from the fact that politics of late years , have degenerated into little more than a competition in spending public money. This is due to the fact that the large majority of electors are receivers of benefit from expenditure rather than contributors towards it. People seem to be less concerned in creating tiro means of material welfare than in scrambling for their supposed share of the product, quite forgetting that when the amount produced has diminished it cannot provide enough to go round so generously. If the wor'd were economically at our feet we might possibly be able to afford all the public luxuries that we have been providing, but what chance have we in New Zealand to afford these things when we are faced with intense competition from outside by countries which refuse to burden themselves with similar handicaps to cost.

Two of the parties in Parliament and the thinking men in municipal affairs see the danger, but we have the Labour Socialist Party in both spheres doggedly resisting any attempt to live within our incomes or to reduce expenditure —and brazenly appealing to individual greed by. promising iavisli expenditure regardless of whether the country can afford it or not. Such lavish expenditure can only come out of taxation, or rates which take from industry the money vitally necessary for its expansion. The only result of the Socialist-Labour Party’s policy would be to increase the burden of taxation and rates to a point which would gravely cripple industry in New Zealand and intensify the present distress.

There is only one safe road for every man and woman in this. Dominion and that is to support those in public life who base their policy not on what we would like to have, but on what we can afford to have.