Long Faces

For the first time in their lives, some 2,000,000 Britons last week began paying income taxes. As stenographers, office boys and charwomen looked into their pay envelopes, from which the Government had deducted the tax, they found just what last April's tax bill meant to them.

When the new tax rates were announced (TIME, April 14) telephone operators and chauffeurs took comfort in the knowledge that a tycoon's income of $274,000 would shrink to $20,000. Until last week they had not realized that a married man earning $18 a week would pay $1.40 weekly tax, that an office boy earning $10 a week would have to fork over 75-c-.

To most of them the tax meant that the slim margin they had left for luxuries--vacations, permanent waves, a pint of beer in the evening--had disappeared. To some it meant cutting necessities from their budgets. Bachelors talked of marrying widows with large families to take advantage of the $200-per-child annual exemption. Engaged girls wondered whether to get married, since, by a quirk of the law, unmarried couples living together get $40 more exemption than married ones. All other British wage-earners chewed the tops of pencils, figured, pulled long faces.

Even longer than the faces of city-dwellers were the faces of many of Britain's farmers. To carry through its food-production plans, the Ministry of Agriculture has already taken over tens of thousands of acres from farmers whom it judges inefficient or who refuse to plant the crops the Ministry demands. This land has been taken on a rental basis, not to be returned until three years after the war's end. But due soon for passage in Parliament is a bill that will let the Government buy such farms outright.

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