TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE BUDGET.
R. CHILDERS'S object in the Budget of this year has _Al_ evidently been to make a great deficit the occasion for fastening firmly on the nation some salutary permanent taxes which, even in a prosperous year, he would not think it necessary to remit. And, perhaps in order to render the change as little onerous as possible, he has put a less heavy weight on the shoulders of those patient beasts of burden, the Income-tax payers, than they had expected, and has thrown upon the future a large portion of the deficit which we might fairly have expected to pay. The newest feature of the Budget is, as we ventured some weeks ago to hope that it might be, the equalisation of the deathduties on real and personal property, a change which, though it brings in but very little at first (only £200,000), will, when it has been in operation five years, yield not far short of a million sterling, or, more accurately, £850,000. Then Mr. Childers finds that the spirit-duties will bear raising ; and as it is hardly fair to Scotland and Ireland, which drink chiefly spirits, to increase the taxation on their luxury without increasing the taxation on our English luxury of beer, he raises the two duties simultaneously. Again, he has put a tax of five per cent. on the income of all Corporations except income devoted to charitable or religious purposes ; and, though we heartily wish he could have ventured to extend this tax to all the income of charitable trusts derived from property,—believing as we do that no income is less economically and usefully expended-than the income of Charities not contributed by living donors, but derived from testamentary bequests,—we accept this tax as the longest step in the right direction which could have been expected from a Minister who cannot afford to raise more opposition to his proposals than it is absolutely necessary to raise. Now these proposals, with the small proposal as to a uniform duty of 10s. per cent, on bonds and foreign securities transferable to bearer,—which is expected to yield L100,000,—will produce £2,100,000 at once, and £2,750,000 within five years, and this without any likelihood that any future Chancellor of the Exchequer, even in the most prosperous times, will think it necessary to take off these burdens. The equalisation of the succession-duties on real and personal property has long been desired ; the tax on corporate property is most equitable ; the tax on what is regarded as excess in drinking is a popular tax ; and the small stamp-duty is a mere rectification justifiable on principle ; so that Mr. Childers has used the occasion of a great deficit to enlarge the permanent revenue by two millions and threequarters, the whole of which will be available even after the strain of a great emergency has passed away. Of course, the raising of the income-tax to 8d. will press upon the middleclasses ; but the middle-classes had expected a considerably higher prenure, and will be so much relieved with Mr. Childers's unexpected moderation, that they will almost feel as if he had taken off taxation instead of added to it. The truth is,—and it is the only objection we have to bring against the Budget,—that this provision of ways and means out of taxation for only one-half of the deficit gives a somewhat irresolute look to a Budget which is. not a war Budget, but only a Budget. of preparation for war. It is open to the interpretation,—we believe a wholly false one,— that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is fostering the Lope that a good slice of the Vote of Credit will never be spent, and therefore need not be actually provided. We do not in the least believe that that is the true interpretation. But we should have been very glad to see a more strenuous effort made to meet out of taxation the full burden of this preliminary war-vote. If we borrow,—and at least the final deficit must be borrowed,—in the green tree, . what shall be done in the dry ? Would it not have been a more impressive, and therefore a more prudent thing, to show how much in earnest we are by at least raising out of actual taxation the whole Vote of Credit, though that need not have involved paying off debt as we had in time of peace declared our resolve to pay it off. We confess that we look with regret on the proposal to leave £2,832,000 to be met out of the Sinking Fund of 1886. That has hardly the ring in it of true financial dauntlessness.
For the rest, we heartily approve of Mr. Childers's reluctance to put a tax on raw materials or the necessaries of life ; while it remains quite uncertain how far it is necessary to straiten further very straitened means. His remark that though there is still a steady increase in the Savings' Banks deposits, both emigration and pauperism have at last began to increase, and the receipts of the railways to decrease, furnishes a very sound reason for not needlessly aggravating the pressure of hard times on the most needy part of the population. Of the new taxation imposed this year, Mr. Childers puts nearly three-fourths on to the well-to-do classes, and little more than one-fourth on to the poor, a fair enough proportion in itself, though perhaps it is to be regretted that the poor who are total abstainers will not be made to feel the burden of their political obligations. The tax is wholly placed on a luxury which is in general more harmful than useful. Not a shilling of the new taxation will touch the total abstainers amongst the poor ; and yet it is the total abstainers amongst the poor who are most likely to exert a certain political influence over the policy of Parliament. However, this is rather microscopic fault-finding, for it can hardly be a serious objection to any scheme of taxation that it hits first those only amongst the poor who make the worst use of the means they have. And if soon we should find that we have a great war on our hands, and that it will take a strong heave to achieve our end, Mr. Childers may fairly boast that he has not as yet even touched those ultimate resources to which we look when a great national end has to be achieved. Mr. Childers may claim to have shown that we can make preparations on a huge scale without even producing in this country the sense of unusually heavy burdens. As he showed on Thursday night, in 1859-60 we paid cheerfully an Incometax of 9d. in the pound, only to provide against the supposed danger of a dictatorial French Imperialism at the time of the war between Austria and France. In 1860-61, we paid cheerfully an Income-tax of 10d., when we had a Chinese war on our hands ; and in 1861-2, and in 1862-3, we continued to pay an Income-tax of 9d. in the pound. Mr. Childers, therefore, is asking us to pay less for the great armaments we are now preparing, than we paid for a good many years together when we had no war on our hands, but only a certain indefinite fear of the aggressiveness of a neighbouring Power. Yet only as regards the Income-tax can the strain of special taxation be felt at all.
The general lesson of the Budget may be said to be that Mr. Childers shows by it how very light a burden it is to England to get ready for a conflict even with such a Power as Russia. He has not given even a turn to what can fairly be called the warscrew, and yet he has shown that it will be easy enough to put very powerful armaments into the field, and that with two or three turns of the war-screw they could as easily be doubled or trebled. We only wish he had not prepared us for a deficit at the end of the year. Even with these hard times, it would have been better to show that, come what might, we would not go into debt before war was actually upon us. But it was a stroke of great wisdom to use the first threatening of war for the purpose of imposing certain taxes which will add to the permanent revenue of the country and not merely to the special resources of a season of emergency.
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