Mr. Patterson has presented an amateur budget to the Liverpool
Chamber of Commerce. It is a bold one. He pro- poses to abolish all the assessed taxes, now yielding 11,165,496, the duties on fruit, coffee, tea, and sugar, and the excise on malt, the duty on marine assurance, and all licences except the publicans', the total loss being nearly £,18,000,000. This sum he would recoup by reducing expenditure, by levying a tax on beer, which he would make heavy enough to yield £10,000,000, and by increasing the house duty by a million. The first part of the scheme is clever and bold,—and in the matter of the tax on marine in- surances Mr. Patterson has hit a blot,—but we question if be were a Minister of State if he would even propose his sub- stitutes. A beer-tax of that severity would either produce a rebel- lion or drive the people to drink spirits, and the house-tax should be let alone till we have got the rating system into better order. Besides, Mr. Patterson forgets that under his system a teetotaller who did not smoke might escape taxation altogether, that is, might enjoy all the advantages of civilization at other people's expense. If he could hit on some popular or endurable scheme for getting income-tax from everybody, he might abolish the food taxes and the rates too; but we are not civilized enough for that yet.
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