Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1890. Mr Jellicoe's Finance.

Manawatu Herald, Volume III, Issue III, 18 November 1890, Page 2

Manawatu Herald. TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 18, 1890. Mr Jellicoe's Finance.

♦ Last week, when addressing: a Wellington audience, Mr Jellicoe, a candidate for l'jrliiunenfc, is thus reported to h:ive dciilt with the vexal questions of income and lnnd tax versus property t:i\. •• Now upon every £1000, however invented, a man has to pay property tax of .€4 3* 4d, that is the tax at Id in the £

But supposing instead of taxing the capital | value of LIOOO we tax the income. Let us suppose the properly owner to be making a n ;t income of LOO out of his investni' nts of LIOOO. You 9ee at one? if you only tax his income ai fid you only k t 30s from hiii. If, therefore, -ir arry really desired to nmk a fair comparison between property tax an I inconi • tax he would have put the mc >me tax at Is 4Jd, because that would be required to be an equivalent tax o income to his id in tle £ on capi tal. Now, if you do this (and I quite fail to see why Sir Harry fixes on 6d) instead of £74.000 being pioduc'd by income tax . as >ir Hurry so or.miimjly surest -, an in- ' con- tax equivalent to his property tax would produce (after sxemp in,' al iuc mie> under £150 a year, and limning an abatement o LI2U on incomes between LI 50 and L 400) the sum of L 179,250. Now, let us deal with his land tax figures. He says the land tax on unim- i proved values at Id in the £ would pro- j duce, without exemption, only £177,000. But if you relieve a landowner of income tax in respect of the unimproved value of his land, and of property tax on his impro- I vements, why should he pay Id in the £ ? At present the landowner pays ali on his land, his dwelling-house, station and farm buildings, fencing, bush clearing, sowing of English grasses, and the value of his stock and furniture. If you let him oil' the property tax ou all but the land surely you might tax him at, l£d en the unimproved value of the land, and then you would get £221,250 out of the land tax. Put this land and income tax together as I have given it, and you will pet £-400,500, instead of LHoO.OOO produced by property tax, and by this means you will have shifted the heaviest weight of taxation from the poor to the rich, from the hardworking struggling settler to the thriving capitalists.

In these remarks ho not only calmly proposes an income tax of one shilling and four pence half-penny in the pound, a tax higher than "has ever been raised in England during war times, but he makes the very serious error of obtaining his total by charging the taxpayer twice over. This will be clearly seen by his assertions that if yon charge a man " an income tax equivalent to his property tax " it would produce the £179,2r>0 he uses in his addition of £100,500. To get the other total to make this last amount, he taxes the unimproved value of the land one penny farthing (which gives a sum of £221. 200) because " you let him off ihe property tax"!!'! Mr Jellieoe, because the property tax is to be abolished, taxes the man with an income tax that shall equal the tax abolished, and then taxes his unimproved land much higher than it is now, because he is let off the property tax ! ! ! During the same speech, Mr Jellieoe informed his hearers that " the country party are frightened at the very name of a land tax they see it in all kinds of terrible possibilities." Mr Jellicoe's finance surely fully justifies the fright of the country party.