NEW TAXATION TERROR.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19218, 8 July 1924, Page 8

NEW TAXATION TERROR.

It will bo hard to convince the patient Briton that anv nation can leach him how to make tho burden of income tax more severe. Tot (the Daily Telegraph saysi he will read with horror of the improvement just devised by the Senate of the United States in the machinery of collection. Henceforth the return made by each free and independent citizen is to bo open to public inspection. Every man and every man’s wife, which intensifies the terror, wall be able to go and read what income their enemies, their rivals, most exciting of all, their friends, professed to enjoy. No rhetoric is needed to describe the consequences- of such a system. The country would be fu.l ot jealousy, envy,’disgust. Men would scoff at tho returns of their business and political opponents on the platform and in the press. Tho legislative body at Washington, we arc told, is eager to suppress bribery and corruption. If every income tax return can be read and criticised by all and sundry, it is believed that the giving and taking of bribes will be too dangerous to continue. Tho expectation seems sanguine. That fear of exposure is the cole sufficient cause of eonre people’s honesty we may sadly admit. But the ingenuity of those who move on tho shadv side of the highway of finance will bo found, wo predict, quite adequate to organise bribery, which is not betrayed by the figures furnished to the officers of the United Stales Treasury. The clever rogue working on a large scale will know how t-o arrange his affairs so that his income can be reasonably ascribed to reputable sources. The peoplu who must euifer are the business, and jrr.ofessional men who are struggling to carry on with inadequate resources. Even in tho prosperity of the United States, we suppose, such unhappy creatures are to bo tound. Pleasant it will be for them to know that their creditors, their competitors, their private enemies, arc reading at the Income Tax Office tho figures which show ho'.v desperately badly they did la£t year.