Word: daltonics
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Publicity-doting Hugh Dalton snuggled cosily into this rite. At his cottage in Wiltshire he posed with an armful of pussywillows. He walked the woods-"Before a budget I always seek out the trees." He listened to chirping birds, and he gathered violets and brought them to his office at 11 Downing Street. There, in his final hours of travail, he sat at a desk "overlooking the forsythia and almond blossoms in the garden of No. 10," reported London's Evening News...
Thus was Britain prepared, with customary sweetness and light, for Hugh Dalton's birthing. But no Briton was wholly prepared for the shock of what he delivered (see below...
...budget was a stunner, in several ways. It was a beauty for balance; Hugh Dalton had achieved a surplus of about ?270,000,000 ($1,080,000,000). It had an unmistakably Laborite look in keeping income taxes high on the rich and the middle class, while easing those of the low-income group. But it had one monstrous feature: the duty on tobacco was upped by 50%. That meant that a package of 20 cigarets, which cost 47? on Budget Day, cost 67? the day after...
Britons, who had expected some increase, were shocked. They swore at Dalton for soaking the poor where it hurt. And they swore they would swear off smoking. By this week cigaret sales had slumped more than half...
...Dalton, who likes a cigar now & then, lectured the House of Commons and the nation on the dollar evils of smoking too much. Britons had spent a whopping ?603,000,000 on tobacco last year; it was almost one-tenth of the national income.* Said Dalton: "We are now smoking one-third more than before the war. About 80% of our tobacco is imported from the United States . . . and we are drawing heavily and improvidently on the dollars which we earn with our exports. . . . The whole total of our exports to the United States at this time barely exceeds...