NO MACHINE-MADE MONEY!

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 55, 20 March 1937, Page 4

NO MACHINE-MADE MONEY!

Our Minister of Public Works is to-day reported as telling the good people of Raglan that he has no inexhaustible purse upon which he can draw in order to satisfy the many claims for attention that are being made upon him. This, of course, must come as a sad disappointment to electors who were led to believe that a Labour Government would have . schemes of public finance that would obviate all further bor~ rowing and any .increase in taxation. All the troubles it would have in this respect would be in the way of meeting obligations incurred by tbe bad old Governments of the bad old days. Yet the first recourses of a Labour Government, once conjmand of the Treasury benches has been secured, have been to increase taxation by £&i million and to borrow another £6 million wberewith to provide Mr Semple's deparfcment with its financial needs. That is what Mr Nash's first Budget tells us quite plainly and quite unashamedly. It is very much like those same bad old times to find Mr Semple eomplaining of the difficulty he has in "extract" ing" money from Cabinet, even though it has the monevmanufacturing machinerv of a fully eontrolled Reserve Bank at its back. Even so, he has to confess, in his own picturesque language* that "money cannot be turned out like sausages" — that is, of course unless you first provide the meat to be chopped up and the casings to hold it in. It is, indeed, a very sad and rather humiliating confession that has to be thus made after all the rosy professions of the election campaign. The Government has certainly "borrowed" some six or seven million of the "national Credit" from the Reserve Bank, but as agamst this it holds the stock of butter and cheese bought with it, and all is going swimmingly. The fun will really begin when the export season's profit aud loss account is made up and the Government is faced, as almost assuredly it will lbe» with a heavy balance on the wrong side. Will this be light-heartedly wiped off the slate as being, after all, only "national credit" and so of little consequence, or will tlie taxpayers be asked to make it good?