Mr Sidney Webb and the Fabians have advocated a system by which the
basis of assessment for income tax should be the income divided by the
number of members of a family, rather than the mere income without any
consideration for the number of people that have to be provided for
out of it. With some such scheme as this adopted there is no reason
why the Government should not have taken, for example, the whole of
all incomes above £1000 a year for each individual, due allowance
being made for obligations, such as rent, which involve long
contracts. For any single individual to want to spend more than
£1000 a year on himself or herself at such a crisis would have been
recognised, in the early days of the war, as an absurdity; any surplus
above that line might readily have been handed over to the Government,
half of it perhaps in taxation and the other half in the form of a
forced loan.

So sweeping a change would not have been necessary at first, perhaps
not at all, because the war's cost would not have grown nearly so
rapidly. All surplus income above a certain line would have been taken
for the time being, but with the promise to repay half the amount
taken, so that it should not be made a disadvantage to be rich, and no
discouragement to accumulation would have been brought about. By this
means the whole of the nation's buying power among the richer classes
would have been concentrated upon the war, with the result that the
private extravagance, which is still disgracing us in the fourth year
of the war, would not have been allowed to produce its evil effects.
With the rich thus drastically taxed, the working classes would have
been much less restive under the application of income tax to their
own wages. We should have a much more freely supplied labour market,
and since the rise in prices would not have been nearly so severe,