A GERMAN SCANDAL.

Shannon News, 21 March 1922, Page 3

A GERMAN SCANDAL.

While the British public is groaning under an income tax of 6/ in impound, with “tiimmings 11 in the lorm of super-tax and Corporation Duly, which, carry, the rate of taxation in some cases to 16/ in the pound, tbb German people have just made themselves an agreeable “present.” The Reichstag lias, in fact, decided to halve the German income tax on small incomes and to lower it v eiv appreciably in the case of incomes so large as £12,,000 a year. In no tise will even the wealthiest German, such as Herr Stinnes, pay more than 60 per cent of his income, against the 80 per cent exacted from the wealthy in Britain. The Berlin correspondent of The Daily Mail has very justly described this a$ “scandalous,” and scandalous it is.

It was a German who once declared that -the Germans would ' never be gentlemen and the British would ay ways' be fools, and this extraordinary state of affairs justifies his remark. 'Happy, indeed, are the Germans who have lost the war. Tneir postage rates, their telephone rates, their railway fares, and their goods freights are mere fractions of the charges in Great Britain. Their works are running full time and pay mg huge dividends, while British company reports make dirmal reading. The real secret of the trouble is that the clause in the Treaty has never been enforced which lays down that “the German scheme ot taxation is to be fully as heavy proportionately as that of any of the Allied Powers. ’ if if it had been, we should not have had the exchange chaos, and two million unemployed would not be walking the streets because the produce of British labour is under-sold by unfair German competition. British incometax —not the German one—would be cut in half because the people w*m made the war would be made to pay as they should for the enormous da- : mage and misery which they caused. —Daily Mail.