HUGE FIGURES

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 60, Issue 4234, 22 January 1940, Page 2

HUGE FIGURES

THE BRITISH NATIONAL INCOME. “With a controlled economy our income could quite well rise to the order of £7 billion,” says Professor Shirras in a spech reported in “The Times.” “If we took the same proportion of our expenditure as in the last year of the last war we could increase dur expenditure as we get to the maximum war - effort to at least £300,000,000 a month. Everything, of course, will depend on the minimum demands for consumption by the individual citizen of this country. We must remember that the cost of running a war has greatly increased, and as things stand to-day we should at least be able to spend half the total resources of the community on the prosecution of the war, as we did 21 years ago. We could, with a national income which has increased in real terms by 15 or 20 per cent., pay even a higher percentage; at all events, until we reach a figure such as this—say, 50 or 60 per cent, of £7,000,000,000 —we cannot say that we are at our maximum war effort. At some risk of being proved wrong by events, I will proclaim my conviction that this is so, especially when . . we have so strong an economic front (even without our ally France) compared with that of Germany.”