Italy's Finances Last Tuesday's Budget pronouncement by the Italian Minister
of Finance should make Sir John Simon feel his task comparatively easy. On the " ordinary " budget, involving civil expenses alone, a deficit of £7o millions is expected to replace an estimated surplus of roughly half a million. Extraordinary expenditure (armaments, Spain and Abyssinia) doubles this deficit and has already exhausted the proceeds of the capital levies raised during the last few years. For the future the Minister fore- shadows a return to financial rectitude; taxation is to cover " not only normal expenditure but also that extraordinary expenditure which has now assumed a permanent character." As this aspiration, translated into figures, involves raising the level of ordinary taxation by one-third, there is apparently a lean time ahead for the Italian people. Standards of living under dictatorships have proved remarkably compressible, but the margin is getting narrow, as is shown by the recrudescence of deficiency diseases such as pellagra. Indeed, when the Italian public realise that the ostensibly temporary tightening of their belts is to go on—" extraordinary expenditure" having " assumed a per- manent character "—the popular discontent already assessed as serious by competent observers may severely reduce even the present problematic value of Signor Mussolini's signature of the Axis alliance.
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