BRITISH AND GERMAN WAR TAXES.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 1494, 8 January 1916, Page 2

BRITISH AND GERMAN WAR TAXES.

“In the Napoleonic wars,” says an American financial expert, “it was commonly said that 40 per cent, of England’s war expenditure was paid from taxes, chiefly through the then newly-invented 10 per cent, income-tax of Pitt. Taxes, especially the income-tax, were already very high in England when the war broke out; it was not generally believed, outside of England, that her people would be willing to submit to much higher taxation. But when the first ‘War Budget’ in the autumn of 1914 introduced only slight changes in the tax Bill, the British taxpayers themselves insisted that their own immediate burden be increased. Last September, therefore, the new Chancellor of the Exchequer announced a very extraordinary series of new imposts. Even so, only 24 per cent, of the present annual British war bill will be met from taxes. But some rational preparation for the aftermath of war has been made, and the interest on the huge new debt will be more than paid by the tax collections. The German Government has flinched from this; it is to-day paying interest on its earlier war loans from the proceeds of the new ones. The Imperial Finance Minister declared in August to the Reichstag that we do not desire to increase by taxation the heavy burden which war casts on our people; that even profits from manufacture of war material are ‘not regarded as a source of revenue during the war,’ and he intimated plainly that the country’s whole war expenditure would be paid off by a war indemnity imposed by victorious Germany on her defeated antagonists. The truth of the matter is, however, that Germany entered the war with her people carrying on their backs new requisition, which is usually the last word in taxation —a special and heavy percentage levy on all the property in the empire, imposed in 1913 to provide for the immensely increased army with which the Government was unquestionably planning, even then, to provoke and win this war. The German Treasury is still collecting this tax, and the probability is that the Government did not dare to try any new experiments.”