NEW & HEAVY LOAD

Wairarapa Times-Age, 2 September 1938, Page 6

NEW & HEAVY LOAD

SOCIAL SECURITY TAX ' ON COMPANIES STATEMENT BY ASSOCIATED CHAMBERS. ADDED BURDEN ON CONSUMING PUBLIC. (By Telegraph—Press Association.) WELLINGTON, This Day. “The introduction in the House of Representatives of an amendment bringing companies into the taxation net for the purposes of the Social Security Bill has come as a thunderbolt,” says a statement issued by the Associated Chambers of Commerce. “This new development means a heavy increase in the already staggering burden of taxation and costs which is being carried by company enterprise in this country. “If any evidence were needed of the utter unsoundness of the financial basis of the present social insurance scheme, it is amply provided by the application of this tax to companies, which is an open confession by the Government that all its expressed confidence in the ability of the country to carry the cost of the scheme by reason of expanding production was merely a smoke-screen and emptiness of words. Before the so-called security scheme is even under way, in its first year, the Government is desperately casting about to find the extra money needed to iloat it, thus violating the undertaking given so recently in the House by the Minister of Finance that, in the opinion of the Government, the scheme could be carried without any increase in taxation.”

After referring to the successive burdens which have been imposed on companies over the last two years, the statement says that by bringing companies under the social insurance taxation, the Government is following its old device of bleeding the taxpayer white without letting him know it, by means of indirect taxation, but it is under-rating the growing knowledge and intelligence of the man in the street to think that he will not come to a realisation of the fact that indirect taxation such as that on companies is borne, not by rich people or organisations, but by ordinary investors and the general consuming public. The consuming public generally, even if holding no shares in companies, cannot escape company taxes. Living costs will rise further and that will be part of the additional price the public will have to pay for the Social Security Bill.