COMPARISON MADE

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 97, 27 April 1939, Page 7

COMPARISON MADE

MR. GLADSTONES FIRST BUDGET r THE TAXATION INCREASE ! British Official Wirelees. ] Received April 26. 11 a.m. RUGBY. April 25. Much amusement was caused when Sir John Simon opened his speech by recalling that Mr. Gladstone, in | a speech which lasted 37 hours, pre-j sented the first of the 13 Budgets for which he was responsible, in 1853, when the expenditure for the year reached the grand total of £53,000,000, and Mr. Gladstone proposed a progressive reduction of income tax, which then stood at 7d in the £. until it finally disappeared in 1860. Unfortunately, added Sir John Simon, the Crimean War broke out. expenditure rose, and the prospect of abolishing the tax vanished beyond recall. His task, the Chancellor proceeded, i uas to present Budget proposals at a lime when the standard rate of in-I come tax was 5s 6d in the £ and the | total expenditure was more than 20 times that of the 1853 Budget. Reviewing the actual facts of the [ last year, he said that the revenue, j , in fact totalled £927,250,100. He attributed! the falling off of the estimated re-| venue to uncertainties which arose out I of the international situation. Defence Paramount Expenditure from revenue last year. I including payments of under £l3,- f 000,000 in respect of sinking fund. 1 totalled £939.999,000. The whole of 1 the country's finance was governed i and conditioned by the defence expenditure. which last year was I £254,500.000. and which, with issues! under the Defence Loan, gave a total i of £382.500,000 for the three defence I forces. With an addition for expendi- i ture on food storage, almost ex- [ actly £400,000.000 was spent on j defence last year. It was relevant to bear in mind that figure when they came to the far bigger expenditure to be provided for in the present year. After noting the results of the year's out-turn on various items of I revenue and expenditure. Sir John Simon said that the net total of the national debt increased during last year by £826.000,000, raising it to £8.863.000.000. Of this increase £lBO,000.000 w .’.s represented by the National Defence Loan issued at 98 in July. Passing to the prospects of the Estimates for the present year, Sir John Simon said he proposed to leave the fixed debt charge at £230.000,000 and to repeat the precaution taken in recent years of getting authority to borrow for the purpose of meeting the statutory sinking fund if the provision in the fixed debt charge was not sufficient. The total estimated for Consolidated Fund services from 1939 would be £247,200,000. and that for the Civil Service £675.244.000. The latter figure included estimated expenditure in the present year on airraid precautions of £42,191.999, of which £37,000.000 would be found from borrowed money and the remainder from revenue. No Reduction in Social Services Omitting defence supplementaries, the total expenditure from revenue for which he had to provide in this year’s Budget, he said, added up to £922.444,000. The fact that such large sums had to be provided for defence had not meant that social services should be reduced. The cost of social services and civil expenditure as a whole was increasing. The total growth since 1925 of civil expenditure from taxes alone might be put at £186,000,000.