THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES WEDNESDAY, December 8, 1937. SQUANDERMANIA

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23369, 8 December 1937, Page 8

THE OTAGO DAILY TIMES WEDNESDAY, December 8, 1937. SQUANDERMANIA

It will be a certain relief to the taxpayers to realise that the passage of the Supplementary Estimates by the House of Representatives is the final authorisation for this year of the payments that are to be made by the Government from the funds provided by them. They are being made to participate in an orgy of public expenditure on an unprecedented scale, and they may reasonably have become alarmed as they have seen the estimates of expenditure in one department after another mounting up and up to levels which could only be justified by the assured conviction that the country had entered on an era of prosperity that would not only be permanent, but be increasingly pronounced. Now they know at least the sum total of the expenditure that is proposed by the Government. It is a stupendous sum, as will be seen from the figures of the various estimates which have been submitted to Parliament: — £ General .. .. 34,427,721 Public works .. 13,370,157 Supplementary 1,613,318 £49,411,196 This is not the complete record of the votes of money that have been made by Parliament. There is an additional expenditure of £ 13,487,422

in respect of departments that provide their own finance, and, because the items represented in this expenditure may be described as selfbalancing, this sum may conveniently and suitably be left out of calculation. The taxpayer is more likely to be concerned than gratified to learn that, out of the resources furnished by him, the Government has budgeted for an expenditure during the year of nearly 50 millions! Of course, as we have previously pointed out, this amount cannot be wholly spent. It is physically impossible for the Public Works Department to spend before the close of the financial year the amount which it has received authority to spend. It will, however, spend a great deal more than has been spent in any recent year, and a large proportion of the money that it will spend is being applied to the construction of works the operation of which will inevitably involve the Dominion in recurrent heavy losses. This is the most expensive form of unemployment relief that has been adopted by the Government. But it is not by the amount of the moneys appropriated which, checked by the limitations of time, the Government is able to spend in the course of the year that its financial programme is to be judged. The significance of its policy consists in its blind assumption that, however the markets for the products of the Dominion may fluctuate, the taxpayers can and will meet a. sweeping increase in the year's expenditure. It is with an amazing indifference to the fact that the national income is a variable quantity, dependent on the prices secured for the country's products in the world markets, that the Government heaps fresh burdens on the people. The price of wool has fallen from 30 to 40 per cent, this year, the price of butter has receded from the fantastic heights which it reached a few months ago and is now at a level that can hardly be remunerative to the State, and an industrial disturbance is imperilling the meat trade and threatening the farmers with serious loss. Yet this is a time when the Government is merrily committing the country to the practice of squandermania, when the City Council in Dunedin under the Labour regime is applying in its own way the policy pursued by the Government, and when the Arbitration Court has indicated that industry will have to submit to a fresh increase in working expenses. The taxpayer, with rueful reflections on the flagrant violation by the Government of its pre-election undertakings with regard to the burdens carried by him, is hardly likely to view the prospect with the optimism that is presumably entertained by those who are temporarily controlling the destinies of the Dominion.