SIR WILLIAM FOX ON TAXATION.

Patea Mail, Volume V, Issue 483, 10 December 1879, Page 3

SIR WILLIAM FOX ON TAXATION.

In a lengthy letter to the Rangitikei ; Advocate , Sir William Fox concludes : as follows-:—“ The retrenchment to ’which "we must look must not be the 'dismissing of 200 or 300 officials sent ■away to starve‘on 'SO acres ot wild land, as -Mr Macandrew suggests. To make the position of the individual taxpayer less grievous than it is likely to be, there must be ft ‘change in individual habits. -I am sorry to Bay 1 see very few signs 'of it yet; but it will have to come. A few days ago I read* in a Wanganui paper, advertisements of four racing meetings to take place-at that town, and what I may call three neighbouring pillages. The sum of £1,640 of public Was ad vertised to be ran for within two months at these four places, and six •month's afterwards Wanganui is to give a ‘Champion Stake’of £I,OOO more. Add to this the entries of the horses '; the hire of the jockeysthe days lost by say some -5,000 spectators; the drink consumed ; the money lost in gambling; the railway tickets,' horse and buggy hire; and other accompaniments of race meetings—the entire cost will not be under £10*000;, Multiply this by all the race-meetings in the colony, and the aggregate will probably hot be less, perhaps very fanuch more, that! £loo,ooo* very little of which can be said to be ” profitably or teproductlvely expended, and the whole of which the spenders might, beneficially to themselves and their families, have kept in their pockets. Then there is the whole round of what are called public amusements* nigger minstrels, strolling theatricals, clog hornpipe rivalries, comic entertainments* and

so forth, all of which mean a large number of pounds spent by persons who, in hard times, cah very ill spare the money. I was told the other day that

a friend who attended a ‘comic entertainment’ in a neighbouring little town, counted nine persons among the spectators who hadjust ‘ filed their schedules.’ Who paid for their tickets ! People will say, ' Well, but these things circulate money.’ So they do, but so does taxation. The question in both cases is, Is the circulation ol money in that way beneficial or necessary ? or would it not have been better kept in the pocket, or more honestly paid to the creditor? Then thcie is that giant absorbent of voluntary taxation already alluded to, the drink-shops. Surely, of the nearly two millions annually poured into the till, a very large part might go to alleviate the burthen ol taxation imposed by the Griverament Since the Public Works scheme was launched in 1870, we have spent on drink and tobacco just about as must as we'have spent upon public works and Immigration. If we had been waterdrinkers and hadn’t smoked, we could have done all that work without borrowing a shilling outside the colony, and might have been the holders of our own bonds, investing in them the savings which have been spent in the liquor and tobacco traffic. We should not have been in the position we now are, trembling for our character in the Stock Exchange, having to send between one and two millions a year to foreign countries, and obliged to submit to £600,000 of extra and involuntary taxation.”