Putting aside the legal difficulties. I suggest that you all give some thought to the type of new taxes that you will like to see introduced, Many people appear to think that the Council ought to collect a tax on income from business profits, Just consider how incredibly difficult that would be in Shanghai, Again, you must remember that no tax is fair unless everybody pays on the same basis, Can you imagine the difficulty of finding out the real income and real profits of the various individuals and businesses of different nationalities in this city? We should require an army of investigators, accountants, inspectors, and even then we probably should not get at the truth, Also, we have no rights to insist on inspecting the accounts or the books of business houses.
Another popular line of thought is a tax on the Stock Exchange and other exchanges. I do not want to be misunderstood, and I will say at once that the Council would be delighted if it could obtain, either by voluntary gift or compulsory levy, any reasonable share in the income made from stock exchange or other similar transactions. But would it really be wise to rely on such a tax to meet the Council's ordinary penditure? What you want, to run a municipality, are taxes that you can rely upon. A tax on the Stock Exchange would bring in a lot of income when business was good; during a slump period it would bring in practically nothing. I would therefore myself advocate that if such 5 tax was introduced it should be usee only to meet abnormal and extra expenditure.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.