Thames Star. MONDAY, SEPT. 26. 1938. GETTING RID OF TAXES.

Thames Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 20422, 26 September 1938, Page 2

Thames Star.

MONDAY, SEPT. 26. 1938. GETTING RID OF TAXES.

“With malic* toward* none; with charity for all: with firmness in the right, a* God give* us to see the right.”—Lincoln.

By far the most important individual item in the National Party’s general anti-Socialist manifesto is the statement that if the Party is successful at the polls, Ihe Social Security Act will not he operated. This will automatically eliminate the unpopular shilling in the £ impost on the wages of all persons at workover 16 years of age and the proposed invidious tax of the same amount on company profits. Tn place of the Act, the existing pensions and social services are to he continued and added to in regard to widows and orphans in particular and liberalised family allowances are to hu provided. There is also to he a com-* plete health service for families up to a reasonable income limit, and a free maternity service is to be established. Further, provision for a universal superannuation scheme is promised, and, no doubt, whatever other additional benefits for the necessitous can be provided within the limits of a fair po'icv of taxation. This method of providing social benefits on a basis that is financially secure should, and we believe will, appeal to the electors as against the grandiose, inequitable and insecure measure that has recently been so prominently before the public. As the Act just put in the Statute Book does not begin to function until April 1 of next year —and in some respects, notably the provision of the preliminary £lO a year superannuation —for a year after that, the election now in progress will have the effect of a referendum with a

dear issue for the public*, and its reaction will, we believe, be overwhelmingly in favour of the moderate National proposals. Another of the many points of the manifesto that should appeal to the Voter will be premises that the wages and salaries of women, pensioners, relief workers, domestics and so on shall be exempt from the unemployment tax. Tf the National Party should have subscribed to the statements of some of the Socalist leaders that unemployment was now non-existent, no doubt a plank of their platform would have been the total abolition of this tax, first- imposed as an emer-

gency measure. In any case, wo think that in view of past records, when under the Coalition Government. the tax was reduced from a shilling to eightpence, there is e'verv prospect that if the Nationalists are successful if will at anv rate be cut to sixpence, fourpence and finally eliminated, and the exemptions now promised warrant the hope that, given a continuance of the buoyantrevenue that the Socialists have enjoyed—and squandered —this may soon be accomplished.