The Waikato Times With which is incorporated The Waikato Argus. FRIDAY. APRIL 4, 1919. POST-WAR FINANCE

Waikato Times, Volume 90, Issue 14029, 4 April 1919, Page 4

The Waikato Times With which is incorporated The Waikato Argus. FRIDAY. APRIL 4, 1919. POST-WAR FINANCE

In view of the fact, which was mentioned in a recent telegram from London, that the national expenditure was still at the rate of £7,000,000 a day, it is not surprising that there should be increasing anxiety amongst members of "the House of Commons for economy in the national finances. In a discussion in the House Mr Lambert, said that in the Budget-£1,500,000,000 would have to be provided for, and Mr Chamberlain, who is Chancellor of the Exchequer, mentioned,' in agreeing to reconsider the Army, Navy and Air Estimates, that the nation's yearly expenditure in future would 1)3 greater than the total pre-war debt. This is unavoidable. Sir Edward Holden recently 'calculated that if £700,000,000 are allowed for the borrowings necessary for demobilisation and other charges, the net national debt when peace is finally arranged will stand at £6,418,000,000. It may be more than that, and probably will be, but even if it Is no more the charge for interest and sinking fund, at 5J per cent., will be £385,000,000. Truth reckons the pensions charge at £75,000,000, so that there will be a bill of £460,000,000 to meet over and above the expenditure on civil government and naval and military forces. Before the war this expenditure amounted to nearly £200,000,000 (including what can be called the comparatively trifling sum of between £25,000,000 and £30,000,000 for interest on the debt), but it will certainly amount to much more in the future. Lord Inchcape, speaking at the meeting of the National Provincial and Union Bank at the end of January, said that £600,000,000 would be a moderate estimate of the annual expenditure to be faced after the war, and that a heavy burden of taxation would have, to be borne for many years to come. "In the meantime," he said, "in some quarters •there appears to be a complete absence of any sense of proportion, and an idea exists that as we have been .able to finance the war by borrowing we can go on financing all sorts of economic schemes in the same way. Almost every other week seems to bring forth the report of some committee recommending some gigantic enterprise. One day we are to buy out the liquor trade, the next we are to nationalise railways or the mines, on the third we are to embark on a vast housing scheme without bothering our heads about economic laws, and on a fourth we are invited to plunge into an electric lighting and power undertaking that will cover the whole country. Nobody stops to ask where the money is to come from. Indeed, people arc almosf'astonished at their moderation when they put forward a scheme that will cost no more than we "spent in a week or a month of the war. Ladies and gentlemen, that habit of regulating our peace expenditure by our expenditure during the war is one we have got to outgrow. I often hear it said that the war has taught us as a nation to think in hundreds of millions. I fear, however, that is just what it has not done. Thought ceases in the presence of sums so immense as to be well-nigh meaningless. We have been juggling in hundreds of millions, if you like. We have been drifting and splashing in them. But, unhappily, we have not been thinking in them; and I know of nothing more urgent than that we should recover our money-sense and begin cutting our coat according .to our cloth. If we don't we shall find ourselves on the slippery side of a rake's progress, which, if persisted in, can only have one end. If the British Government is to meet its obligations in the future as it has done in the past, if the country's credit is to be maintained, we must live within our income, and not on our capital." What is here true of the position in Britain is just as true of the position in New Zealand, so far as the need for economy is concerned. Upon the financial skill of British Governments in the next few years the whole future of Britain will depend.