The Wairarapa Daily. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1891.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XII, Issue 3968, 20 November 1891, Page 2

The Wairarapa Daily. FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1891.

Within the next seven days many thousand maledictions will be uttered against the Hon. Mr Ballance and his great feat of financial legerdemain • ; The Land and Income Tax Act." The forms required by this measure are in the hands of settlers, and the filling up of the same means much trouble and vexation of spirit. To many they will be a weird puzzle worthy of the best efforts of a Philadelphia lawyer, and the patient sufferers who have to make the returns are further adtnouifhed that if they declare them falsely their duty will be trebled and a peualty ranging from five to a hundred pounds charged against them. The property tax returns are sufficiently complicated for most people, and it took several years to educate settlers to a thorough comprehension of them, but the land and income returns are, as compared with them, a fearful conundrum beginning with deductions for improvements, further deductions for exemptioua, continuing with a separate schedule for the graduated tax, and finishing with special instructions for dealing with the mysteries of deferred payment and leasehold lands. It would almost atswer thj Government's purpose to send round a popular lecturer to expound the ramifications of the returns, and to diffuse general information as to their complications. The filling in of these return? will be no joke either for settlers or for the trained and capable officers of the Department who will have to decipher some extraordinary hieroglyphics. And the present batch ot returns are only the first turn of the rack. When the Income Tax returns are asked lor there will be still further angui3h on the part of settlers. We believe that many farmers could far more readily answer the celebrated Chicago teaser than state accurately their real income. When the Property Tax was first struck, we protested against it as an unnecessary and vexatious lovy, but its successor, the Land and In* come Tax, will cause endless worry and trouble throughout the land, and every effort sLoulij he made to get it repealed as speedily as possible.