DECLINE IN THE REVENUE.

Globe, Volume XXI, Issue 1817, 17 December 1879, Page 4

DECLINE IN THE REVENUE.

The Exchequer accounts for the second quarter of the current financial year have been published, and the " Times " remarks that it cannot be agreeable to have to confess that the revenue of tho country is declining, yet this is the revelation forced upon us. The total income received during the six months just ended is, indeed, just the eame as that received in the same period of 1878 —strictly it shows an increase of £4050 —but this equation is due entirely to the rate of the Income-tax, which made that item of receipt more productive by £729 000 than it was in the corresponding months of 1878. We have, in fact, been receiving arrears of a tax levied at 5d in the pound, instead of arrears of a tax levied at 3d in the pound. The additional receipts from this source are, moreover, becoming exhausted ; and hence we have the result that while the revenue of the six months has produced, as we have Baid, a trifling sum of £-1000 more than last year, the revenue of the last three months shows a decrease of £IOO,OOO as comparod with the same quarter of 1878. The income of last quarter has been, in truth, singularly unsatisfactory. It may almost bo said that every source of revenue has yielded in it less than before. There is an increaso in the interest received on advances and in the miscellaneous receipts, but these aro not revenue items. They have nothing lo with the productiveness or unproductiveness of taxation. They are credits corresponding to debits on the other side, and but for greater regularity of account might bo struck out both from receipts and expenditure. The real sources of revenue, the Customs, the Excise Duties, Stamps, Land Tax, and House Duty, even the Post Office and the Crown Lands, have all brought in during the three months, July—September, 1879, less than they did in 1878. The single item on the other side is that of Income-tax, producing a large income of £98,000; and this must be mainly referred to the operation of the increasing rate still working in the way we have explained. A falling off all along the line is not an enlivening fact, even where there is no inheritance of past deficits to make good. Unfortunately, we have arrears from last year and from the year before, and the revised Budget of the current twelve months shows a deficiency approaching to £1,200,000, even supposing tho full cetimate of revenue to be realised. The " Economist" admits that if English finances were in a proper condition a deficit of evon a million or more, though it would certainly be unpleasant, might bo regarded with comparative equanimity. In present circumstances, however, it is a serious matter With a most reprehensible disregard of all correct principles of finance, Sir Stafford Northcote has persisted in carrying forward from year to year a great mass of uncovered expenditure. Ho commenced this year with a debit balance of £5,350,000. To that there has been subsequently added a sum of £1,1G3,000 on account of the Zulu war, which ■was supposed t" cover the expenditure at the Cape up till the end of July. There are many who maintain t!?at the outlay to that date will greatly exceed tho estimate, but however that may be, wo see that the military operations have been dragging on long beyond the time for which provision had professedly been made. A further expenditure on this account must accordingly be expected, Then the freah outbreak in Afghanistan has involved an expenditure which it would be an outrage to attempt to fix upon the people of India. We have thus a confessed deficit of six and a-half millions, and a knowledge that if we deal honestly with India the deficiency must be very much greater.