TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE BUDGET.
Ti' you continue the Income-tax unmodified, what do you give us for it? That is the question which Sir Charles Wood was ex- pected to answer, but which he fails to answer satisfactorily in his Budget. The character of the Budget is teasing littleness. Sir Charles has a little surplus ; but to make it go the further in pur- chasing a little credit here and a little credit there, he divides it into several pieces, not one of which is worth having. The very process of examining it obliges you to plunge into a sea or rather a pool of littlenesses, tedious from their multiplied triviality. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has a surplus of nearly 2,500,0001., which he disposes of in this way : about a million towards the reduction of the National Debt ; reduction of the Coffee-duty, the Foreign from 6d. per pound, the Colonial from 4d., both to the same level, 3d. (176,000/4 ; reduction of the Timber-duty 1286,00014 ; repeal of the duty on imported seeds (30,0001.) ; reduction of the present Window-tax by one-third (700,0001.), and commutation into a House-tax. He also proposes to trans- fer part of the cost of pauper lunatics (150,00014 to the Con- solidated Fund. Sir Charles's financial reform may be said to go no further than a sort of tampering, which must tantalize everybody and satisfy nobody : if he has a principle, it may be said to have been that of not fulfilling the wishes expressed by deputations. As a matter of finance, perhaps the timber is the clearest gain : the Colonies will not be very thankful. Sir Charles was particularly asked to take the tax off paper; but perhaps that was too untried a process for a simply sequacious mind, so he falls upon the usual pet of reducing Finance Minis- ters—coffee : the duty has been reduced several times before, with excellent effect on the revenue, and he continues to harp upon the same tried string. He vindicates this selection by the failing revenue on Foreign coffee as compared with Colonial ; forgetting that the increase in Colonial coffee may partly be accounted for by improvements in the growth of the berry. He professes to believe that the reduction will mitigate the adulteration; but coffee of no kind can compete in cheapness with burnt peas and coffin-wood. The one grain of sense in this fiscal manoeuvre is buried in a heap of chaff. Seeds might have been given to the agriculturist without an ostentatious emblazonment in a budget : most English Finance Ministers could give such a sum as the tax produces out of their own pockets. The transfer of the lunatic ex- penses in part, is a grudging gift. The treatment of the Window- duty is a very complicated affair. The reduction and the conver- sion should be considered separately, for they have no necessary con- nexion. It is evident that, according to Sir Charles's plan, the duty on windows might have been transferred to houses with- out any reduction of duty at all. The removal of the duty from windows is an absolute good in a sanatory sense ; but the reduction of the amount by one third will not fulfil the expectations of a single person, and is hardly worth the fuss that has been made about it. Some striking injustices of the present tax would be unamendecl ; the low-rented house, for example, with many win- dows to it, in a decayed neighbourhood, will still be heavily taxed in comparison with the house of the richer man. There is a manifest absurdity in making people pay a future tax on houses according to the rate at which they have paid the past tax on windows. Such are the items of Sir Charles's long little bill— .everything unsettled, nothing worth the unsettlement. You emerge from his operose statement de minimis with the feeling of a traveller whom the bad road has obliged to drive through a .stony' weedy, jolting, hindering horse-pond.
If Sir Charles Wood wished to gain real credit by doing real good, he would have adopted some broader plan. The Income-tax -was originaly given by the country to cover a deficiency, with the further deficit which must temporarily attend the process of modifying and reducing taxes for the purpose of revivifying com- merce : to keep faith with the public, as the revenue recovers and the deficiency narrows, the income which was meant to cover the loss should be pared off. A reduction of one third in the Income- tax would have been valued by every taxpayer, whatever his po- litical class.
If Sir Charles Wood had desired to do what he professes, and to have continued Sir Robert Peel's process of castigating the tariff -under the cover of the Income-tax, that would have been an intel- ligible process : but what resemblance is there between Sir Charles's tinkering trifles and the budgets of 1842 and 1845 ?
If Sir Charles Wood is under an instinctive necessity to deal -with the National Debt, he should adopt some more adequate means of coping with that vast difficulty. He makes a great boast of saving a million a year—one-fiftieth part of the annual income ; which he likens to the thrift of an individual : but how should we estimate that thrift in a private person who should set aside only one-fiftieth part of his yearly income towards the pay- ment of a debt amounting to sixteen times his yearly income ? Even that saving is not promised as a settled thing ; on the con- trary, the poor Minister professes to have a beggarly dependence on a casual "surplus." An earnest desire to begin the process of recovery from debt would assume a very different shape.
Three courses would be open to a financier moved by such a desire. He might at once raise taxes sufficient for an actual .sinking-fund to diminish the principal. Secondly, he might lighten the immediate burden by attacking the yearly interest. A more statesmanlike course would be, to leave the surplus alone for a time, until it should have grown to proportions worth hand- ling; then to revise the whole taxing system, so as to make the in- cidence easier to the taxpayer and not obstructive to trade :
uL- der such a process, the produce would become considerably larger, and then, without pressure on the subject, it would be possible to form a sinking-fund—say of five millions a year, which would be- gin to have some tangible effect in mitigating the pressure of the Debt. For be it always borne in mind, that to a country so rich as England, it is not the amount of taxes which is the real pinch- ing grievance, but the bad distribution of the burden and the bad expenditure. England can always afford to pay for useful work done, and for processes which would free her commerce or put her finance in a sounder state. But our Chancellor of the Exchequer cannot get beyond little niggling manoeuvres with differential duties, little percentages on other men's taxes, and little excuses for doing no more.
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