“THE bleeding GOVERNMENT”

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23500, 14 May 1938, Page 24

“ THE bleeding GOVERNMENT”

ro nu editor

Sir—My education must have been sadly neglected in my youth, for i stiir fail to see that the injustice of a tax of £-3 13s 4d on an income of £l4O per annum is altered whether

! the tax is called income tax or emergj ency unemployment relief tax. Is my burden to be eased by a name? I don’t think. Why the need for this tax? 1 According to the statements of Mr Savage and company unemploj-ment is almost non-existent. Is it not possible to be a politician and still be frank? Of what worth is a man if you cannot depend on his word? It is the injustice of the tax that I wish to stress —not the name. I still maintain most emphatically that my name for the Government is justified.—l am, etc., A Squirming Victim. [Our correspondent is mistaken if he supposes that in informing him that he had erroneously named the tax in the first instance, we were justifying the tax. We may now point out that a provision of the law enables a person to apply to the Commissioner of Taxes for exemption from the tax on the ground that the payment of it I would involve him in serious hardship.—Ed. 0.D.T.l j TO THE EDITOR ! Sir,—“A Squirming Victim ” suggests I a new name for the present Government. Yes! I suggest that the name be, “Long Live Labour.” “A Squirming Victim ” has an invalid wife and a schoolboy son. There are plenty in the same box and they do not squirm over it. I have three schoolboys, and j I lost one child during the National Party’s term of office, and I can weep when I think of all the times my four children went to bed hungry and cold, when work was provided for a miserable three days and three days and a-half a week and one stand-down week, and I had to keep them from school because they had no boots to put on their feet. ‘A Squirming Victim ” must not forget that that was under the National Party’s rule. I would ask him to answer one question: Do the children of to-day have to go to bed hungry and cold? No: thanks to the Labour Government, we get all the good food we want and can buy extra comforts in the winter Perhaps "A Squirming Victim ” only imagines that he cannot work. There are many like that. He will perhaps have the impudence .to tell me that I was not capable of my position as housekeeper. I can say I was, and. if he could have done better on 28s a week after paying 15s a week rent, he has nothing to growl about now. During the five years of starvation and misery we went through I forgot what a £5 note was like, but how is it that I now see as many as four of them a month? —I am. etc., A Navvy’s Wife. Central Otago, May 12.