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Budget. Apart from the daring program just set forth, the new Budget may be summarized thus: 1) Expenditures are estimated at £806,195,000, and receipts at £812.497,000, thus leaving an expected surplus of £6,302,000; 2) Drastic economies will be effected by discharging 11,000 civil officials during the coming year; 3) The exemptions from the income tax already extended to parents, in proportion to the number of their children, are now sharply increased. Thus a single child, which brought an exemption of £36 ($175), last year, is at present worth £60 ($292) in exemptions. Additional children are worth £50 ($243); 4) Trifling alterations in the British tariff schedules will result, for example, in a fall of one farthing ¢c) per pound in the retail price of sugar; 5) Finally Chancellor Churchill budgeted with satisfaction that, although Great Britain must pay upon her debt to the U. S. this year the sum of £32,845,000, she will receive the nearly equivalent sum of £32,000,000 from German reparations and the debt payments of her Allies.
Although Great Britain's National Debt (internal and external) now amounts to the stupendous total of £7,527,000,000 ($36,581,220,000), Chancellor Churchill declared stoutly: "We need only to go on paying the same sort of sums as we are now paying steadily and punctually and our national debt will be extinguished within the lifetime of some of us now living."
Significance. The immediate and specific features of the new Budget were all but ignored, last week, as Liberals and Laborites leaped up to attack Conservative Chancellor Churchill's program of shifting the local tax burdens of producers to distributors (and of course eventually to consumers).
Cried David Lloyd George (Liberal) bristling wittily at Chancellor Churchill: "Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul! . . . He [Churchill] is robbing the whole twelve Apostles in order to endow Paul. . . . Any such program would constitute an indirect subsidy for the property owning classes [i.e. for the owners of farmlands and producer goods]. . . . The whole proposal is thoroughly vicious!"
Snapped crippled Philip Snowden, onetime Laborite Chancellor of the Exchequer: ''This plan to abolish all taxes on hundreds of thousands of acres of land ... is perfectly outrageous. ... A monstrosity! . . . The landlords are to be put still further on the dole. . . . Scandalous ! . . ." And Cripple Snowden thumped the floor with his two rubber-tipped canes.
Impartial observers thought that the Conservative Cabinet has hit upon a shrewd program, well calculated to catch votes, and probably destined to further the extremely basic interests of British industry and agriculture. The burden of the "rates" has not seldom been recklessly imposed by local authorities, and should properly become a matter of national concern. Finally the 1,000,000 workpeople who continue unemployed in Great Britain should be able to find many a job in the producing industries which Chancellor Churchill proposes to assist or partially subsidize. Therefore the votes of the unemployed and the votes of most laboring working people will tend to be drawn to the Conservative Program of foxy Chancellor Churchill.