HIGH COST OF LIVING.

Taranaki Daily News, 28 December 1929, Page 8

HIGH COST OF LIVING.

But for its regrettable attack upon the farming community there would have been general sympathy with the contention of the Auckland Telegraph Service Economic Committee that to merely raise is no solution of the economic evils tJiat .attend the wageearner, because any such increase in earnings is almost invariably accompanied by a rise in the cost of commodities. Without dealing with the question of whether the salaries paid to officers of the Post and Telegraph Department are adequate, or do justice to the importance of the duties they are called upon to perform, there are few who will not agree that what is required is a reduction in the ccet of living, so increasing the effectiveness of wages. An arbitrary increase of salaries will certainly do nothing in the direction of reducing the cost of living; on the contrary, it will almost inevitably add thereto, and the wage-earner will find himself no better if as well off as under the old rate of pay. But when the economic committee saw fit to attack the farming community for accepting aid from public funds to the extent of £1,000,900 per year it obviously laid itself open to a counterattack. Nor had the Auckland provincial president of the Farmers’ Union (Mr. A. A. Ross) much difficulty in showing there was another side to the question of subsidies which the telegraphists had claimed were made to farmers. Mr. Ross was able to show that the farming community was by no means the only section of the public to receive benefits from the public funds, and he made the strong point that whatever direct benefit the farmer may receive from the State assistance referred to by the economic committee, the man on the land had in the long run to pay by direct and indirect taxation the full price of any aid afforded him. The telegraphists’ criticism of the farming community for having forced up land to boom prices and for having launched out into freezing works and other enterprises beyond the needs of the Dominion could have been applied with equal 1 force to other sections of the public, and, in any case, no good purpose is served by drawing attention to misjudgments or follies of the past. It is the future that must be prepared for, and the high cost of land can be overcome if the high and ever increasing costs of production can be brought down. That is the problem ahead of New Zealand, and every section of the community must assist in its solution if prosperity is to become general.