THRIFT

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 18965, 17 March 1924, Page 4

THRIFT

Though considerably belated, it has recently become the fashion to talk “Thrift”—thrift for the Government, thrift for the municipalities, thrift for all public bodies, and, perhaps most important of all, thrift for the individual. Most of us seem to find it much easier to talk thrift than to be thrifty. We compk.in about and criticise extravagance in others; but for ourselves and our shortcomings, No! Yet it is quite clear that if we are to pull clear of our present difficulties and prepare ourselves to meet future emergencies, some individual effort must be made. The returns of imports recently published are not reassuring, the Bank records of deposits and withdrawals tell very plainly that as a people we have not given up spendthrift habits. Upon what particular luxuries and superfluities eur money is spent matters but little: what does matter is that as a community we have got into the way of spending too much on things which connot truthfully be said to come within the orbit of our reasonable requirements. Most of us do not realise what small individual economies mean to the national weal. For instance, wo will say there are 250,000 wage-earners in

this country. Whether there axe a few more or less does not matter. If one shilling per week was saved by those 250,000 it would mean £12,500 per week, and for fifty-two weeks the saving would be £650,000. Now, one shilling per week would be a very small thing indeed, and would not be noticed in tjie expenditure of any ordinary working man’s family. If two shillings per week were saved it would amount to £1,300,000 per annum. Probably there are a good many cases in which not 2/-, but £2, could be saved without occasioning any appreciable hardship. A gentleman intimately acquainted with financial affairs and a thoughtful student of economic problems has given it as his opinion that, at a modest estimate, a real earnest thrift campaign would result in a saving of at least £5,000,000 per annum. Five millions per annum would soon put the finances of this Dominion in a very sound position, and the probability is that sum in the total would not involve any one of the individuals who helped to save it in any noticeable sacrifice.