I understand that one of the difficulties which proprietors of picture-houses all over the world experience is that they find it necessary to relate the tempo at which they show pictures to the intelligence of the audience who come into their houses. The human fabric being constructed as it is, some people understand more readily what is presented to them orally or visually than others, and owners of picture-houses have discovered some means of determining what is the proper tempo at which scenes should be flashed on the screen for different classes of audiences. As I have sat here from year to year listening to Ministers introducing their Budgets, I have wondered if we could not get hold of some of these methods or reaction tests to ascertain at what late period this Government will discover new ideas with regard to finance and national economy, that Budget days are no longer, as they used to be, days on which the Chancellor or the Minister for Finance presented humdrum calculations as to the manner in which he can raise certain taxation from the public and how he can spread the money raised in that way, in his efforts towards pauperisation as it is developing here, miscalled social services. Elsewhere there is an appreciation of the fact that Budget day means some sort of inquiry into the whole national economy and national income, some examination as to what proportion of the national income should be put at the disposal of the State for spending, the use of that spending being to ensure the full development of the resources of the country.
Taking the Budget here to-day, is there anything approximating to even a very remote approach to that idea? When one has got through all the platitudes in which the Ministerial statement is couched, one comes to this: that agricultural output in these days, which should be ideal for the maintenance of self-sufficiency, is in-volume down by 10 per cent., industrial production is in volume down by 20 per cent., and taxation has got to the point when the Minister thinks it impossible any longer, without cracking the whole economic system, to make further impositions. We have a situation in which emigration is increasing and increasing, our adult population is being dissipated elsewhere, marriages are becoming fewer and later, a smaller number of children is being born into the country, disease, particularly tuberculosis, rates are rising, and crime is stabilised, according to the statement of the Minister for Justice, at double what it used to be. If we take the Minister's statement as indicating any attempt to state what the resources of the country are, we find that the liabilities of the State and of local authorities now exceed the assets by some £93,000,000 and we propose to continue the system that has brought that about. I know one place where the tempo of certain people might easily be tested by this Budget. If the Minister would betake himself to whatever hide-outs profiteers huddle in, in order to finger in a furtive way their gains, or go to those places where speculators generally boast of what they have been able to make, and attempt to read the Budget to them, he would be told in a few choice phrases to cut the cackle and come to the horses, the horses in this case being excess profits. Then when they realised that this Budget brought no change in their case the first order would be to dispense the drinks so that these profiteers might drink to many happy returns of the day on which the Minister had treated them so well.
The Minister has referred to England with regard to corporation profits tax, but let people understand the situation there as opposed to here. In England from the start of the war the Chancellor's idea was to ensure, as was promised here, that there would be no profit-making out of the exigencies of the situation and they collect there 100 per cent. excess profits tax. If concerns were not able over certain trading years to establish a standard profit for themselves, the Government stabilised the trade profit at £1,000 per annum. Here in such cases we stabilised it at £2,500. In England the Chancellor has raised the floor of that £1,000 to £2,000 but the standard is still £500 under what we allow here in our generosity. In England there is also 100 per cent. excess profits tax. A certain amount of that it is true is assumed to be repaid to industry for re-stocking and other purposes after the war. We are allowing 25 per cent. over the standard profit, if there is anyone who brings out trading results over the standard we have established at £2,500.
According to the Minister's statement here to-day, the yield from the corporation profits tax as opposed to the yield before this tax was established in any sort of intensity, has risen by almost £4,000,000, while you have a ceiling put upon the earnings of the small man, the civil servant, the small wage-earner, the man earning insufficient wages in the Guards, the Army, the small business man, the small clerk. The ceiling is clapped down upon these people, while the living space underneath it has become somewhat narrow because the means at least for living in that living space have become more difficult to obtain. On the other hand, the roof is off for the man getting excess profits. The only thing is that after the Minister has imposed his exactions on the community, the excess profiteer is stimulated to take still further exactions from these people by the fact that the Minister says to him, "You collect what you can; pay me 75 per cent. of it and I will give you a handsome tip of 25 per cent." That is to be continued and we throw that money to these people although three years ago the Minister came into this House and told us that the books and the returns of the Revenue Commissioners had shown him that people were making profits out of the international exigency. And he still throws that money to them. This undoubtedly will be a delightful day for them. This is the best ever Budget from the point of view of these people. They might at least have thought that after the public comment there was on it that even in this year the Minister would attempt to take the full 100 per cent., leaving them to get away with and hoping that they will be able to develop in the future what they have illegally, unlawfully, rather unethically earned over the last three years.
On the other hand, the Minister may also try out the reaction test on certain other people. The Minister's Budget contained one joke about smoking or snuffing or chewing our way towards certain objectives and one tear, which was manfully repressed and indeed barely dropped at all, when he referred to the intolerable cost of living. He said: "...there are large professional and other groups of various kinds, representing a substantial part of the population, whose income has either remained stationary or contracted." The Minister knows well that their income has remained either stationary or contracted; the Minister and his colleagues are responsible.
The standstill Order still operates. The last number of the Trade Journal which had relevance to this matter, I think, showed that amongst certain classes, industrial workers, the increase in wages over those who had remained in industry amounted to something in the neighbourhood of 19 points in 100, 1/6 in the £5. The cost of living has risen 70 per cent., and the £ purchasing value is somewhere between half a guinea and 11/-. And that is being continued.
The Minister makes a comparison with the other side which I consider to be misleading. I think one of the remarkable matters discussed in the Budget on the other side, and which might at least have directed the Minister's attention to the situation that had developed here, was that the Chancellor in England recently said that he did not consider that it was a sacrosanct point at which to keep the cost of living, somewhere between 25 and 30 per cent. above the cost of living, that is, the point at which they would keep it through subsidies. Then he remarked that wages have risen by 40 per cent. I quote from the speech: "To-day the rise amounted to 40 per cent."
That was the increase in wage rates. Earnings, of course, had increased considerably more but wage rates in England have gone up by 40 per cent., while the cost of living is stabilised somewhere between 25 and 30 per cent. over the pre-war figure. We have "stood still" our workers. The small man, the small housekeeper, the civil servant, the Guard and the man in the Army, the small clerks, are stabilised at a point which allows them something in the neighbourhood of, say, a 20 per cent. rise on the 1939 point, and the cost of living bears down on them with the heavy weight of 70 per cent. above the pre-war level. I thought that the iniquity of the comparison as between allowing the profiteers to get away with 25 per cent. on whatever they can make over and above what was regarded as their standard profits, and the attempt to stabilise the unfortunate underdogs in the community, representing, as the Minister says, a substantial part of the population, would at last have aroused the Minister's conscience and made him say that he would take, even this year, the full 100 per cent. and apply whatever he got—and there is £1,000,000 to be got easily in that way—in some attempt to relieve the almost impossible burdens on the other people.
The main thing about this Budget is that there is a great deal in it about the future although Deputies will have noticed with interest that arterial drainage is off as far as this year is concerned, family allowances, I gather, are postponed, and the pace with regard to afforestation is obviously not going to be speeded up. I know of nothing that is promised in the immediate future except, if you please, tourist development. What we propose to invite tourists to come to see in this decaying country, I do not know. We are going to have great tourist development, to get in people from outside or maybe it is to enable us to spend more pleasantly the great leisure we presumably will all have without the money to spend that leisure in any sort of comfortable way.
The Budget aids in no way towards production. The Minister attempts to cast his eye objectively on the situation and he sees agricultural output down, industrial output down, taxation at the cracking point, and still we propose to go along in that way. Everywhere else people are being invited, through the use of finance as an instrument of production, to engage in what are called adventures in prosperity and we, with an enormous amount of resources outside the country, are invited to continue still along what I can only describe as the downright drift to a desperate depression.
