INCOME OF PERSONS ENJOYING OVER £160 PER ANNUM, 1908-9
| Gross Assessments to Income Tax Schedules A, B, C, D, and E | £1,010,000,000 | |
| Deduct | ||
| Items not representing real income, etc. (see page 12) | 185,900,000 | |
| £824,100,000 | ||
| Add | ||
| (a) | For under-assessment under Schedule D | 60,000,000 |
| (b) | Foreign profits escaping tax | 25,000,000 |
| £909,100,000 | ||
The foregoing figures relate to the fiscal year ended March 31st, 1909, the latest period for which detailed figures are available.
It is necessary to point out again that while this fiscal year 1908-9 covered the assessment of the calendar year 1907, which was a year of great profit-making, it did not fully assess the profits of that boom year. Under Schedule D of the Income Tax the profits assessed in 1908-9 were the profits of the three years 1905, 1906, and 1907. That is to say, the figures just arrived at, £909,100,000, are an understatement of the true aggregate incomes of those having upwards of £160 a year in 1907. The actual income of the income tax payers in 1907 greatly exceeded £909,000,000.
In "Riches and Poverty" (1905) my equally conservative estimate of the income tax payers' aggregate income for 1903-4 was £830,000,000. We therefore get the following comparison:—
GROWTH OF AGGREGATE INCOME OF PERSONS ENJOYING OVER £160 A YEAR
| 1903-4. | Estimate of "Riches and Poverty" (1905) | £830,000,000 |
| 1908-9. | Estimate of this Edition (1910) | 909,000,000 |
| Increase | £79,000,000 |
And this remarkable growth in five years is shown in spite of the fact that I have allowed for £13,000,000 of income tax assessment as being due to increased severity of collection, for I have assumed that £13,000,000 more of existing home profits were revealed in 1908-9 than in 1903-4.
Now let us turn to the incomes which do not exceed £160 a year, and which, therefore, are not assessable to income tax.
First of all, we have the class of small incomes which lie between the manual workers and the income tax payers. We cannot hope, in view of the poverty of the information which our present Census methods place at our disposal, to estimate this part of the national income with any degree of confidence, and we can at best arrive at a rough approximation. I estimate that in 1908, of our "occupied" population, about 3,100,000 were neither income tax payers on the one hand nor manual labourers on the other hand. That is to say, they were petty tradesmen, civil servants, clerks, shopmen, travellers, canvassers, agents, teachers, farmers, inn-keepers, lodging-house-keepers, pensioners, and so forth, whose profits or salaries are below £3 per week. At what rate can we estimate their average income?