TAXES IN GERMANY

Taranaki Daily News, 11 August 1930, Page 9

TAXES IN GERMANY

MIDDLECLASS BURDENS. UNLUCKY CIVIL SERVANTS. Germany is going through a series os' such financial shocks as she has not experienced since the world generally recognised that she is indeed stabilised and reconstructed. At the head of affairs at present is a professor and theorist, the wise and kindly economist of Cologne University, who became Minister of Finance in Germany when the Socialist, Dr. Hilferding, left the Muller Cabinet. In an attempt to bring about a general reduction of wages and salaries throughout the Reich within the next year or so, Dr. Moldenhauer, representative of the middle classes arid the bulwark against I the extremes the Right and Left stand for, has succeeded in causing more agitation, rage, fear, and disappointment among the ranks of hie own party than any Labour Minister yet born. To meet Germany’s burdens arising from unemployment, he drew up a taxation programme of which any yniversity professor might be proud, and the result was a criticism on the part of the right-minded which no Socialist financial reformer of the deepest dye in Germany has yet had the pleasure of arousing. What has actually happened is that a cynical but, unfortunately, all too true construction has been put upon his plans. In the belief that capitalists, threatened with new taxes, withdraw their money from a country—-a belief borne out by the certain knowledge that this is what capitalists did in the Germany of the inflation days—Germany’s Finance Minister determined to levy a special tax on the classes who could not escape him. The unfortunates are the civil servants of all degrees and those employed in permanent positions whose salary does not fall below the annual income of an equivalent of £420; that is to say, those so well paid that they do not fall into the class who pay unemployment insurance money. Four per cent, on the income extra to income tax already paid—s per cent, in the case of the unmarried —is the basis fixed. Intense bitterness has been roused among these middle-class victims.