CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, 29 January 1916, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

WHAT WE ARE DOING. The Mother Country's war expenditure within a month or so will have attained u rate of £2,000,000,000 per annum, or £42 per head of the population of the United Kingdom. New Zealand's war expenditure on that basis, assuming she were doing her full share, would ho £42,000,000 per annum. New Zealand's was expenditure may be set down roughly at £8,000,000 per annum, against which must be set a sum of about £S,000,000 extra profits earned by the Dominion under war conditions, leaving a debit balance on a "profit and loss" war balance-sheet of £3,000,000. To provide that £3,000,001) we have borrowed £6,000,000 from the Mother Country! To put it another way, we are spending only one-fourteenth of the money Britain is pouring, into war channels, in proportion to our population, and we are taking from Britain, at a time when her financial resources are taxed to the utmost, 37J per cent, more money than the total of our war expenditure. And this at a time when the Prime Minister, in an earnest appeal to the people, says: "Honor dunands, that wc should make sacrifices for the good of our fellowmen, for the protection of our homes and children, and for the sanctity of our home IK;.'"—Lyttelton Times.