ABSTRACT
Absurdity. Mr. Pitt’s surplus fund: After taking office in 1784, Pitt introduced a number of new taxes by which he created an annual surplus of income over expenditure. In May 1786, he introduced the so-called Sinking Fund, which was used to alleviate the national debt accumulating since the American War. New capital was raised as the Government paid in £1 million each year for the Fund’s commissioners to buy up Government stock. With the outbreak of war in 1793, however, the scheme had become an ‘absurdity’, as the Government was now forced to borrow money at high rates of interest to give to the Fund’s commissioners so that they could redeem the debt at a much lower rate.
